Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos,
1971’s How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
is a filmic document of a very particular time and place. In fact, it might best
be described as an anthropological curiosity that just happens to be captured
in film form. Originally banned in its native Brazil,
and rejected for official competition at the Cannes Film Festival due to the “excessive
nudity” of its aboriginal cast, the movie is a sort of docu-style, very
tongue-in-cheek black comedy, rich with a vein of political metaphor that no
longer holds the same market value.

Set in the mid-1550s in the coastal jungles of Brazil, the film
tells the story of a nameless French adventurer (Arduino Colassanti) who gets
captured alongside a bunch of Portuguese mercenaries by a cannibalistic tribe of
native Brazilians, and then tries in vain to convince his captors — who are in
fact loosely allied with the French, but don’t understand his language — of his
nationality. Sold out by a portly trader who disingenuously tells the tribe he’s
Portuguese, the Frenchman is informed of plans to eventually eat him, months
down the line. Still, the tribe treats him well, bequeathing him a wife, and
including him in the group’s agricultural activities and rituals. The movie,
then, is a picture show of indolent ceremony, custom and idyll, punctuated by
panicked bursts of argument and attempted persuasion.

How Tasty Was My
Little Frenchman is a very loose adaptation of German explorer Hans
Staden’s celebrated and infamous 16th century first-person chronicle, which
details a similar experience that he (obviously) escaped to tell about. As is,
it plays a bit like a foreign cousin of Wicker
Man, one man
raging in culturally isolated vain against a collective who regards him with no
small bemusement. The big problem, though, is that How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is robbed of its contextual rooting.
The film was made in a dark time in Brazil’s
military rule, and regarded as a veiled societal critique. From the outside
looking in, one can appreciate this vantage point, but not be swayed by it. The
construction of the film — with classical music blaring over its opening 10
minutes, and intermittently throughout — comes across as arbitrary, and there’s
too much narrative slack in the second and third act, no matter the 80-minute
running time. Only in the movie’s interestingly staged last 10 minutes — in which
the Frenchman’s wife confesses a sadness at his impending death, but nods when
he asks if she will then still eat him — is there any real downhill momentum or
lastingly memorable drama.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 1.33:1 full
screen, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
comes with an entirely adequate audio track, which is a mixture of French, Tupi
and Portuguese. The problem is that the movie’s English subtitles sometimes lag
distressingly behind the dialogue, leaving one to suss out who is saying what. Boasting
a new digital transfer from a restored negative, the picture for the film is
superb, with only a very small amount of grain occasionally popping up. The
disc’s supplemental extras consist of two interviews, the longest of which is
an 11-and-a-half-minute, rambling and frequently incoherent chat with a
modern-day member of the Krenak tribe, which is depicted in the film. This bit
scores high marks for potential, but there’s no authorial hand here to shape
the material, which actually seemingly begins in mid-thought. The other chat
is, therefore, the best. A nine-and-a-half-minute, direct-address mini-lecture
from Columbia University
film studies professor Richard Peña, this monologue makes up for in insight
what it lacks in flair of presentation. There’s also a gatefold insert with a solidly
informative essay penned by Darlene Sadlier, a professor of Spanish and
Portuguese and an adjunst professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana
University. To order the movie via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)