Our Backstreets #19
From Russia with (Too Much) Love
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Every blogger knows the thrill when one of our posts—hopefully, our whole blog—receives a lot of hits. It’s validation that we wrote something good, something people are interested in, something that will last in the vast ephemera that is cyberspace.
Well, I have such a post about a rather obscure movie that is fully deserving of the widest exposure possible. And that’s the problem. The fact that it exposes widely has made it the most popular of my posts, thanks to a certain group of Russians who are exceedingly fond of kiddie porn.
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a marvelous film that represents the best of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early 70s. It tells the tale of a Portuguese soldier who is being held prisoner by a Brazilian tribe, which intends to eat him in the fullness of time because they mistakenly believe he is French and therefore their enemy. Photos from the film were hard to find when I first posted this review, but I managed one. It shows an elaborately wardrobed European lying in a hammock with a nearly naked native woman in the background. In fact, this entire film is loaded with bodies naked save for a few baubles because that’s how this tribe chose to garb itself. The photo above is representative of a lot of the frames of this film.
A link to my review was posted on a discussion board by someone whose moniker appears as agepi using the Roman alphabet; if you view this person’s moving icon, I think you can imagine a better transliteration from Cyrillic than "agepi." This link was posted September 28, 2007, and within the first couple of weeks, I had nearly 1,000 hits to my review. Unfortunately, I don’t read or write Russian, so I could not thank this sudden influx of film enthusiasts for their interest in this film and my work. Nor did I know what they were saying about it. You have to understand that when I visited the site, there were moving icons of pretty women here and there, but also one of Stalin. I didn’t suspect the nature of their interest until I started poking around the whole site a little.
My growing suspicion that the films this crowd liked were not likely to be reviewed at Ferdy on Films was confirmed by the housekeeper of one of the elderly residents of my building, who could read some Russian. Then I started getting a little wigged. I live in a town that has a large number of Russian residents. I go to the same produce markets, liquor stores, and pharmacy as they do. I’d go to the market, see a Russian sizing up some tomatoes, and wonder what he planned to do with them. I’d see a Russian at the Walgreen’s picking up a prescription and wonder whether he was getting some Viagra to use with his underage girlfriend—after he plied her with liquor from the Russian deli I’d seen him exit 10 minutes before. My life was truly a nightmare for a short time until I put the incident into perspective.
Let’s face it, fellow film bloggers, porn sites are the most popular web sites on the planet. I stumbled into this world by accident, and am regularly reminded of my dubious popularity by the hits to this review that come at a slower, but still steady pace.
Be careful what you wish for… l
6 Comments:
At June 5, 2008 2:56 PM, Daniel said…
Very interesting story, Marilyn. It speaks to both the quality of your posts and, most definitely, the spotlight you put on films that a lot of people have never heard of. This is a good thing, I think, even if it rarely gets mixed up with the wrong crowd.
The Russians aside, this sounds like a really interesting movie.