Foreign Land

The excellent Brazilian cinema series, which plays in the next months at the MFA and the Coolidge Corner, gets off to an indifferent start with Foreign Land (Terra Estrangeira), a predictable international crime melodrama in the Wim Wenders vein (brooding characters, obsessive music, melancholic landscapes). The reason for starting with Foreign Land is obvious: this 1996 picture, which eluded American distribution, is co-directed by Walter Salles, responsible now for Central Station, which is up for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and a Best Actress nomination for its star, Fernanda Montenegro. Salles's talent is sometimes on display in the earlier film, especially in his undeniable feel for settings: much of Foreign Land takes place in Portugal, which boasts such dramatic yet underutilized backdrops as the white, hilly city of Lisbon and the dramatic cliffs towering over the Atlantic. Still, there's little that can be done with a background story of drug dealers, jewels hidden in violins, and guys with shades and ponytails on the chase. At the center is a maudlin love story, a Sleepless in Seattle tale in which a guy in Brazil (Fernando Alves Pinto), unhappy at the death of his doting mother, and a woman in Lisbon (Fernanda Torres), tired of her sordid life with a heroin addict, are going to gradually meet up. They do, they fall in love, and the bad guys chase after. Not exactly Central Station.

-- Gerald Peary