Robeco Filmdag: Estômago

The way to someone’s heart is through their stomach and that is a fortunate thing for the sponger Raimundo Nonato, who has arrived in town by bus with no money, who turns out to have an unsuspected talent for cooking and manages to seduce the prostitute Iria with it. He starts in a simple snack bar and is then taken on by the owner of an Italian restaurant, who teaches him, with plenty of rhetoric, the tricks of the trade. Nonato, an antihero in all other aspects of life, excels with dishes that he conjures onto the table with the simplest ingredients. Iria, who really loves food, rewards him in kind.
Then Marcos Jorge treats his audience to a first flash-forward and it becomes apparent that Nonato ends up in jail where, in accordance with the pecking order, he find himself in the worst place in one of the many shared cells. But there too, his culinary talents are discovered and he climbs the social ladder inside the four walls of the prison cell. Only at the end of the film, it becomes clear just how Nonato ended up in jail. Before that, a delightful fable unfolds about power, sex and food in which a good-natured good-for-nothing slowly but surely acquires some self-respect before crashing into the harsh wall of reality.