It’s World Cup season, and you know what that means — bars serving at 9 a.m., if you know where to look.
The world would be a better place if all sports movies were like Diamantino, the new film from Portuguese directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt. Concerned with the importance of personal excellence, skill honed through discipline and effort, and the ability to become the living embodiment of a crowd’s aspirational joy — these are things that all sports films have in common. But this particular feature also understands pansexual whimsy, social responsibility, the pernicious couplings of fascism and capitalism, how the modern world feels like there’s a sci-fi foundation beneath everything going on, and the axiom that abstract giant bounding puppies (pictured) improve just about any situation.
Diamantino Matomouros (Carloto Cotta, who was in Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy a few years back as well as Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon) is a beloved soccer-playing beefcake who finds himself in an existential crisis when he disappoints his entire nation at the World Cup. A chance encounter with a refugee boat kicks the previously unused part of the brain devoted to helping others into gear, and all of a sudden Diamantino wants to help a world in need. But his twin sisters (always announced by hollow-kick-drummed mid-’90s eurodisco, here as in the underseen but essential Happy as Lazzaro a signifier for bourgeois atrophy) and their allies in the fascist mad-scientist underground have other ideas. Fortunately, there’s a phalanx of lesbian spies aiming to keep the moral compass of the world in balance, even when conspiracies are afoot and sex characteristics are becoming rather uncharacteristic.
This movie is hysterical and insane and stuffed to the gills with luxury, bisexual lighting, good-hearted decency and sexy people of all types who understand that shirtlessness can be next to godliness. See it with your weirdest friend, and be prepared to learn some things about yourself.
