A Comédia de Deus

An erudite, ironic and erotic comedy. As in his majestic Memories of the Yellow House, Joao César Monteiro himself plays the lead. He doesn't play himself, but nor does he play someone else entirely. In A Comédia de Deus Joao Monteiro is Joao de Deus. It is not a divine comedy, but a Monteiro comedy. De Deus/Monteiro is a master ice-cream maker in the film. He runs a wonderful ice-cream parlour called Paradise for his ambitious female boss. There meticulously chosen and trained young ladies sell the ice cream that he makes himself, sometimes even using his own strange recipe. His skills as ice-cream maker are great, but he is really more interested in the waitresses. They have to play a role in fulfilling his innocently perverted and comic desires. For instance, he has a girl swim around the floor on an air-bed as he accompanies her movements as an orchestral conductor, and he asks the young daughter of the butcher to take a bath with him in milk. This evokes the fury of the butcher; he survives the attack but his cherished collection of pubic hair, in his Book of Thoughts, is unfortunately lost. When his boss wants to merge with a famous French firm, he sees his job as ice-cream maker in jeopardy. He gives a French connoisseur a very perverse example of his skills.