Other reviews missed a key point of the movie: its take on the huge Brazilian social apartheid.
A commercial filming crew takes over the lobby of a decadent building in downtown São Paulo to use its beautiful elevator, a reminder of its glorious past. The crew art director gets stuck in the other elevator, together with two morgue workers, a helper and the corpse they were removing from the building.
The movie goes around the clash between the middle class filming crew and the poor, marginal inhabitants of the now decadent building. This relationship is brilliantly developed in the attitudes of the crew towards the tenants, which goes from disgust to downright manipulation: the tenants get mesmerized by the filming spectacle, forgetting they are only stuck on the floor, unable to get home, by the same crew that took over the spare elevator. But the poor are not idealized either: street smart, some take advantage of the visitors up to the point of theft.
The script is perfectly crafted along three story lines ran in parallel: the commercial filming, the Felliniesque group of five people (one of them dead) in the damaged elevator, and the crew assistant looking for help to fix it.
A final nice touch happens towards the end, when the identity of the dead man is revealed in a smart, unexpected, and almost poetic way.
The many details make this movie a little masterpiece, worth viewing a second time.
A commercial filming crew takes over the lobby of a decadent building in downtown São Paulo to use its beautiful elevator, a reminder of its glorious past. The crew art director gets stuck in the other elevator, together with two morgue workers, a helper and the corpse they were removing from the building.
The movie goes around the clash between the middle class filming crew and the poor, marginal inhabitants of the now decadent building. This relationship is brilliantly developed in the attitudes of the crew towards the tenants, which goes from disgust to downright manipulation: the tenants get mesmerized by the filming spectacle, forgetting they are only stuck on the floor, unable to get home, by the same crew that took over the spare elevator. But the poor are not idealized either: street smart, some take advantage of the visitors up to the point of theft.
The script is perfectly crafted along three story lines ran in parallel: the commercial filming, the Felliniesque group of five people (one of them dead) in the damaged elevator, and the crew assistant looking for help to fix it.
A final nice touch happens towards the end, when the identity of the dead man is revealed in a smart, unexpected, and almost poetic way.
The many details make this movie a little masterpiece, worth viewing a second time.