Garrincha, the People’s Joy

“I can only make films in Brazil and about Brazil. Only Brazil interests me,” once declared Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, whose five features and nine shorts form one of the most important oeuvres of Cinema Novo. His debut feature—arguably one of the greatest films about soccer—is a form-shifting documentary portrait of his country’s beloved bow-legged dribbler Mané Garrincha. Interspersing moving images and still photographs (many taken by Luiz Carlos Barreto, who also produced and co-wrote the film), de Andrade weaves a kaleidoscopic sketch of the unlikely athlete. In three sections, the film imparts a direct-cinema look at Garrincha’s daily life and his celebrity; a dramatic, near play-by-play account of his performances (and upstaging by the much younger Pelé) in Brazil’s 1958 and ’62 World Cup wins; and, finally, a coda suggesting the icon’s mythic hold on his spectators’ imagination as something by turns galvanizing and paralytic. 2K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.