In the countryside of Brazil, the itinerant circus owned by Valdemar (Paulo José),aka the clown Puro Sangue, travels from village to village to bring happiness to the dwellers. Valdemar's son Benjamin (Selton Mello),aka the clown Pangaré, does not have any document but his birth certificate and dreams on having a fan of his own. Benjamin decides to leave the circus in search for his identity, to settle down in a small town with a steady job and raise a family of his own. However, he returns to the life in the circus with his dreamed fan.

"O Palhaço" is a deceptive, boring, dull and tedious film by Selton Mello. A couple of months ago, I saw the trailer on television and I expected a great film. Fortunately I have not gone to the movie theater and I feel sorry for those that have gone. Today I have just seen "O Palhaço" on DVD and I really did not like it. It is impressive the number of fake reviews in IMDb promoting this flick. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "O Palhaço" ("The Clown")

Very bad the film "O PALHAÇO" (The Clown),directed and played by Senton Mello. I pity for the children that I saw many mothers taking to watch this annoying movie, thinking it would supply the lack of a actual circus nowadays in Brazilian big cities. The story tells about a depressed clown,but the cheating advertising from Imagem Filmes hides that. It is a boring movie, depressing, irritating, long-winded, tedious, filled with many unnecessary sequences, as well as with dead times and jokes with no fun at all. The few jokes are about farts and low humorous things like that. I was compelled several times to leave the session in the middle, and it was a relief to realize that it was not a very long movie.

It is, unfortunately, a Brazilian tradition. We are very good in music, TV' s series and soap operas but we are lousy movie makers. Ones can find mistakes in the script, in the sequence, everywhere in almost all films. New and old ones. Brazilian movie makers think they are Italians, but they are not. They think they are Fellini, Antonioni, etc, but they aren't. They are just a poor Selton Mello, and that males a great difference. Difference between somebody behind the cameras and nobody. That is typically a nobody movie. Dull, boring and a never ending movie. It is a movie showing Brazilian inland by a guy that had never been there and does not knows anything about there. The sequences in the countryside of Minas Gerais state are meaningless, false and fake. The dialogs in Portuguese sounds also fake: no local accent, no regional terms, no nothing. The make-up is also fake. There are female countrywomen leaving the crops after a day of work with a very nice hair, straight from a beauty parlor. And that awful movie, like all others in Brazil was financed by different levels of public entities with our people's money. But the core issue of my opinion is that this a RACIST movie. There is a single scene in which the character of Selton Mello, without any dramatic reason, says crystal clearly that black men smell bad. In other words black people stench. And I don't know the reason the movie was nominated to the Oscar, considering we are the second largest "African" Country in the world.