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God’s Comedy
(A Comedia de Deus)

Screening on Film
Directed by João César Monteiro.
With Cláudia Teixeira, Max Monteiro, Manuela de Freitas.
Portugal, 1995, 35mm, color, 163 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.

Among his most deliciously perverse films, God’s Comedy centers around the outlandish presence of Monteiro, once again as João de Deus, now employed as the eccentric manager of the Paradise ice cream parlor and inventor of its renown and guarded ambrosia. A collector of female pubic hair—including a precious strand from Queen Victoria—Monteiro's Joao de Deus embodies the cryptically entomological eroticism that lies at the tremulous heart of his late films. The meticulous staging of God’s Comedy underscores Monteiro’s heightened sensitivity to the occult eroticism of everyday rituals, rendering the serving and stirring of the ice cream as sacred and hauntingly sensuous ceremonies.

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