Confused by ‘Diamantino’ but love the puppies

It's happened to every movie fan: Sometimes you walk out of the theater (or your living room) feeling confounded about a film you just saw. Even if you kind of liked what you saw, you're simply not sure why.

That was the feeling I had after watching "Diamantino," a film that opens today at the Magic Lantern. Following is my review of the film, which I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:

Over the course of the 28 years, two months, 11 days and more or less three hours that I worked as a staff writer for The Spokesman-Review, I spent roughly 25 years reviewing movies.

And one of the most common comments that I recall hearing during that time went something like, “It sure must be fun to watch movies for a living.” To which I would always answer, “I don’t get paid to watch movies. I get paid to write about movies.”

And as anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a movie theater knows, writing about some movies isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that crafting a movie review even begins to compare with, say, delivering a baby, frying burgers over a hot grill or even writing a traffic ticket. 

What I am saying is that sometimes – not often, maybe, but sometimes – movies show up at your local neighborhood theaters that so defy description they would pose a critical challenge even to James Agee.

I mention Agee – who died in 1965 at the tender age of 45 – because he, arguably, was the first serious American film critic. And yet I doubt that Agee, for all his cinematic knowledge, would know what to say about the Portuguese film “Diamantino,” which opens today at the Magic Lantern Theater.

Here, for example, are just a few of the issues that “Diamantino” tackles: lesbian love affairs, government conspiracies, sibling disloyalty, tax evasion, unethical medical research, populist political movements, the plight of refugees, social-media ostracism, Portugal’s resentful attitude toward the European Union, gender fluidity, the basis of genius and – at the root of it all – the obsession behind what Americans refer to as soccer but what the rest of the world calls simply football.

And let’s not forget the platoon of giant fluffy puppies that Diamantino envisions whenever he’s on a football pitch.

In short, Diamantino (played by popular Portuguese actor Carloto Cotta) is an intellectually challenged, physically gifted football player who – suddenly and inexplicably – finds himself so unfocused that he blows his chance at winning international football glory. Subsequently made into an ongoing Internet joke, and devastated by a death in his family, Diamantino responds by adopting what he thinks is a refugee – though he’s so uninformed, he admits, that he calls his new ward a “fugee.”

It’s at this point where the conspiracy takes over and Diamantino – already a suspect in a government money-laundering investigation – becomes a pawn both in an attempt to clone him – yes, clone him – in the interests of Portuguese nationalism and in the plan of his twin sisters to rob him blind.

The question that co-writer-directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt ask involves whether Diamantino can overcome all obstacles and, ultimately, find true love.

Left unanswered are the causes of Diamantino’s Candide-like innocence, the source of his sisters’ truculence, not to mention how the filmmakers expect anyone to make sense of this enjoyably wacky project they’ve put on the screen.

Maybe the giant fluffy puppies could explain.