Avis des critiques

The plot sounds like next-generation Almodóvar or latter-day John Waters, but because Diamantino is so gentle and nice in its intersectionality, it ends up somewhat hapless, with a downbeat, wistful ending.

A simultaneously goofy and deft satirical comedy. There are moments in which this film feels like an early Adam Sandler comedy remixed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Bioethics, offshore banking, the surveillance state, celebrity in the age of social media, the politics of immigration—Diamantino is, through its expansive menagerie of subjects as well as its formal maneuvers, a relentlessly contemporary work of art.

A candy-colored concoction of a political satire that on paper sounds quite frankly insane.

The tone of affectionate wiseassery that marks the film may be a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, though how any skeptic can hold out past the moment where Diamantino blows a kiss, then proceeds to ‘juggle’ it on his body is quite beyond me.

To say any more would ruin the dizzy charm of this film’s endlessly antic, weirdly relevant plot.

Pitched halfway between the candy-coloured nihilism of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) and the absurdist hijinks of queer classics by John Waters, Abrantes and Schmidt’s genre- (and gender-) bending film takes place in a 2018 dystopia where everything— decadence and poverty, mass migration and high-stakes football—is reduced to formal values like colour, texture, and tone.

Diamantino’s view of the world is at once utterly ridiculous and an entirely apt depiction of the current moment. . . . Yet the prescience of this idea is undermined by both repetition and occasional jarring simplicity, most glaringly in terms of gender. For all the many jokes that land, several become dulled by sheer overuse, as if the directors only had enough good material to fill forty minutes rather than ninety.

As a scintillating visual experience, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt ’s Diamantino was the main rival to Godard’s supremacy. . . . In the middle of the game, as the striker bears down on goal, the screen is suddenly filled with pink, fairy floss-like clouds and giant puppies (!). This scene, the most unforgettable of the entire festival, sets the stage for the free-wheeling, eccentric plot that follows.

For me, the irreverence eventually proved exhausting, especially as so many jokes, like Diamantino’s guest room pillows and sheets being adorned by his image, were one-off rather than expanded, elaborated and taken to new extremes. Yet for all the easy jokes made about an empty-headed footie god, Diamantino surprisingly elicits a great deal of compassion and feeling from its titular hero.

Abrantes and Schmidt here manage to merge pre-Code sex hijinks, queer irreverence, and pop-art anachronisms into a dazzling, day-glo, sci-fi romance—an ambitious undertaking that hardly lacks for talking points. Shooting on richly textured 16mm celluloid, the directors continue to cut analog beauty with striking digital detritus gathered from all corners of the pop-culture landscape.

Even without devoting time to mulling over whether a lesbian secret service member posing as a male refugee could have saved Diamantino (Carloto Cotta) from fiendish medical experimentation, pleasures abound simply from experiencing this film, which deviates so far from Robert McKee-esque industry norms that we are frequently ambushed by comic details and visual asides.