Amor Estranho Amor (Love Strange Love) 2

While I've grown up seeing numerous classic foreign films, there are gaps in my exposure to them, which I've been trying to rectify in recent months by going on Amazon and ordering some that I haven't yet seen. Occasionally, the people at Amazon will recommend a film I've never heard of before, and I'll buy it, sight unseen. Sometimes this works; sometimes I get "recommendations" from them that prove foreign movies can be just as dull and banal as American movies. Case in point: Amor Estranho Amor. Basically, the plot...such as it is...concerns an adolescent boy dropped off at an ornate Brazilian brothel where his mother works by his grandmother. While there, various "residents" or "employees" seem taken with him, and go out of their way to entice him into their beds. Ultimately, though, it's his own mother who succeeds in taking his virginity. If this sounds like the plot of some bizarre porno film, that's understandable, but it seems as if Walter Hugo Khouri would like his audience to take it all very seriously. Some political intrigue is thrown into the plot to keep it all from becoming too porno-like, I guess, but it doesn't make any of it all any less dull; disturbing even. The scenery is beautiful, as are the actresses, but I never found soft-core porno all that enthralling even in my late teens, much less now. Too, I'm hesitant about suggesting that anything in the film constitutes child porno, or anything even close to child porno (obviously, Amazon wouldn't be selling it if it were), but there's something very disturbing about watching a naked 12-or-13 year old boy entwined lasciviously with a naked adult actress supposed to be his mother. In Italy, a horror-zombie film came out in the early 80's entitled "Burial Ground" that had a youth in the storyline engaging in zombie mayhem and also inappropriate behavior (to say the least!) with a maternal figure, but, given the laws in Italy at the time, they had a midget playing the role instead of an actual youth. I'm not sure that would have worked any better in "Amor Estranho Amor" but I assuredly would have been less uncomfortable sitting through it. Maybe it would have made the film as hilarious as "Burial Ground" turned out to be (the midget in that film...named "Peter Bark" in the credits...has to be seen to be believed).