Rio, I Love You is part of a series of films about cities. Paris, Je t'aime and New York, I Love You are the two others. They're all made up of short segments, and all are based on the idea of love – of one kind or another – in those cities. So, they're collages, and love poems to the cities themselves. None of the films is great cinema, but all three are charming, sometimes touching, sometimes befuddling, and sometimes very good.
Rio, I Love You of course, flies its audience down to Rio. The opening is even on an airplane coming into Rio, where it's warm and sunny, with a reputation for beaches and skimpy bathing suits. Most of the short films that make up Rio, I Love You include the sea and the beach -- and people in bathing suits. But not all of them, and the beach can look less than inviting.
In one chapter, a man fashions in the sand a stunning imitation of the Rodin sculpture "The Kiss." Most of the film is shots of legs. When the woman's legs that inspired the beach sculptor are joined by a pair of male legs, the sculptor destroys his work – only to appear in the morning with another sculpture – of her legs. In another segment, a nasty young wife leaves her older, wheelchair-bound husband on a beach listening to music with his eyes closed; he does not see when she gets in trouble in the water.
Some of the short pieces are ironic. Others are about love gone sour, and play unhappiness against the startling beauty of the place. A few are demure or happy. Some turn musical. American actor John Turturro directs and acts in vignette about a marriage falling apart, which ends with the wife singing about the breakup as she leaves their gorgeous pink home surrounded by the intense green of nature run rampant. Most everything in the films is lush – even the despair.
Anthology films, as these are called, ask filmmakers to do what many of them are unfamiliar with. It's hard to work in short-form. Talented novelists often struggle with short stories because they have to shape the essence of a situation right off the bat, and the form doesn't allow for much change or development in the characters before it's time to end the piece.
It seems that the best of Rio, I Love You's short films don't feel the need to tie things up. They end with a situation established and the possibilities uncertain. After a car crash, a boxer is left with one arm and his wife in a wheelchair. Surgery may restore her, but to get the money, he fights in nasty outdoor fight clubs – and a one-armed boxer makes a bizarre sight. He makes a dangerous wager which might compromise her – and the film ends as his last fight begins. Like many of the films in the series, this one is left ambiguous.
Rio, I Love You has nowhere near the bite or the deep comedy of 2014's Wild Tales, or Jim Jarmusch's mind-boggling Night on Earth, from 1991, which is made of five short films, each set in a different city, but all at the same time in one night. That's a full, complete, and complex film. At their best, the pieces in Rio, I Love You reach beyond themselves, but some don't go far. They also run together, with no titles or separation between them. One short runs into the next. It can be like looking at a series of postcards or snapshots of scenes from Rio.
Rio, I Love You is still a good-hearted break from the usual. Scenes and characters change quickly, along with the moods and the views of the city. The film shows Rio as a place with texture and complexity, but only in short spurts and it's never very tough.
