DIAMANTINO: Forrest Gump Meets Brexit

The idiot savant trope has mercifully died out in recent years, and yet it still feels persistent in pop culture due to how frequently it was utilised in many beloved films of the past. You don’t even have to look far back to see it define the characteristics of the title characters in two separate best picture winners, Rain Man and Forrest Gump. It’s an undeniably problematic trope and one that now rightly gets called out whenever it appears – which is why the silence surrounding critical darling Diamantino is somewhat deafening. 

Open hearted, with a mean spirited undercurrent

After its debut at Cannes last year, where Diamantino won the Grand Prize of the Critics’ Week sidebar, this Portuguese surrealist comedy has received rapturous responses at festivals the world over, a particularly surprising feat considering that this is a broad comedy most easily defined as “Forest Gump meets Brexit”.

Like Robert Zemeckis’ Oscar winner, the titular character is never defined as having a learning disability, but it’s inherently coded into the text – making the film’s attempts to make us laugh at his sheer foolishness towards the evil plan being masterminded around him feel mean spirited. He’s a skilled footballer, with a loveable mindset that sees him prioritising the needs of others over himself. But he’s depicted as the same broad caricature of stupidity as everybody in his orbit, in a way that left a sourer taste in my mouth than I had anticipated. 

Carloto Cotta stars as Diamantino, a vague Cristiano Ronaldo surrogate in that he’s the most celebrated soccer star in the world (and certainly the most famous in Portugal), but also renowned for his lack of intellect. Of course, directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt heighten this to ridiculous levels; he can only play football successfully if he imagines giant fluffy puppies on the pitch around him, and when he ruins his career by missing a potentially winning goal in the world cup final, it’s because he finds himself in a position where he can’t daydream as easily.

This is due to the fact that he and his family saw a group of refugees passing their vacation yacht mere days before. Diamantino, whose instincts are far more humanistic than any European soccer star I can think of, becomes obsessed with their plight, and declares an intention to adopt one while on a break from the sport.

This is where Aisha (Cleo Tavares) steps in, an undercover agent sent to uncover the money she believes he is storing in offshore bank accounts. Posing as his new refugee son, she comes into his life just as his own twin sisters (Anabela and Margarida Moreira) have signed a shady deal with a far right political party which sees him unwittingly becoming the face of the “Pexit” side of Portugal’s EU referendum campaign, and something even stranger beneath that.

Self-Consciously Wacky

For a film this self-consciously wacky, tonally more of a European cousin to the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man in its go-for-broke approach to its bizarre conceit, my earlier Forrest Gump comparison may seem something of a reach. It’s nowhere near as straightforward from a structural perspective, but the overarching effect is similar.

Gump visited all the major landmarks of modern American history, whereas Diamantino is sent on an odyssey that touches on the major issues of modern European politics, from the refugee crisis to the far right politicians who aim to exploit it for greedy financial gain. The humour, however, is what sets it apart – it’s unexpected for a film so widely beloved by critics to feel like a rejected screenplay for a new Austin Powers sequel, with the names and locations substituted, but the zaniness remaining firmly intact.

It feels hard to laugh at Diamantino primarily because of the uneasiness surrounding his characterisation. He appears to have a learning disability that keeps his mindset firmly within that of a child; he’s never had sex because it seems “difficult”, and all the secret files on his computer are pictures of cute animals and selfies he hadn’t shared on Instagram. And yet we’re still supposed to laugh at his antics, ambivalent to the evil masterplan occurring around him, in a way that feels cruel.

If the screenplay weren’t aiming for the broadest laughs, and toned down his worldview so it didn’t feel like that of a man with learning disabilities, any issues with the overarching cruelty would dissipate. The problem then, however, would be that the film would still be too insufferably quirky to make any meaningful statement on the issues integral to the plot.

Diamantino: Conclusion

Diamantino is a singular, striking cinematic debut – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. There’s a mean spiritedness running counter to the open hearted socio-political message that made it hard to embrace with open arms, making it miss its goals in the same way Diamantino failed to score in the World Cup final. 

Diamantino enters limited release in the UK on May 10, and in the US on May 24.