Vereda tropical

Testing the contours of censorship (it was immediately banned), Andrade’s small erotic milestone, and one of the funniest Brazilian films of the 1970s, centres on a man whose objects of desire are fresh fruits and vegetables – the riper the better! Made as part of an omnibus project of short stories adapted from Brazil’s men’s magazine Status, Andrade described his film as a fantasy whose lead character is ‘cultured’ and speaks about his personal life in a lucid and healthy way.
‘There’s no nudity or bad words’, Andrade said to the press, discouraged, as he received news of the military veto. Evidently the film suggests a liberated form of consciousness that the new regime feared. The outlandishness of fruit-fucking is beside the point, unless the censors were worried people would waste the food supply?