The Lady from the Shanghai Cinema

Prado pays tribute to film noir in general, and to The Lady from Shanghai in particular; but given that Welles' mirror-play classic was itself a genre deconstruction, it's little wonder that Prado's film ends up being more labyrinthine than its play on fantasy and reality, death and desire, can quite accommodate. On a chance visit to a fleapit, seedy estate agent Lucas (Fagundes) enjoys a steamy near-encounter with femme fatale Suzana (Proença); the next day, he finds himself selling a flat to her sinister husband. A slave to his hormones, and intrigued by this rapidly developing B-pic scenario, he is plunged into the customary abyss of mistaken identity, secret societies, drug runners and dead sailors. The film impresses with its hothouse look - all neon, sweat and ceiling fans - but its narrative obfuscation, spiked with Godardian distancing, is too complex to hold the attention.