‘Carnival Is Over’: Tallinn Review

Dir/scr: Fernando Coimbra. Brazil/Portugal. 2024. 123mins

For Valerio (Irandhir Santos), the underworld family business, inherited from his late father, is a prison. Valerio and his high-maintenance wife Regina (Leandra Leal) would prefer to cash in his share of the illegal lottery syndicate that is his birthright, and enjoy life in his villa in the hills of Rio De Janeiro. But in Fernando Coimbra’s droll neo-noir, every attempt to escape pulls the couple further back in. This darkly comic tale feels a little overstretched and could perhaps have handled a firmer hand in the edit. But Santos and Leal both impress, with performances that are as committed to mining the film’s mordant humour as they are to its spiralling violence and treachery.

Slick foreign-language genre fare

This wry crime thriller reunites writer/director Coimbra with Leal, who starred in his acclaimed, multi-award-winning feature debut, A Wolf At The Door (2013). The film, which also dealt with Brazil’s criminal underbelly (albeit with a less comedic tone), claimed prizes at Rio and San Sebastian festivals among others. Coimbra’s subsequent work includes the English-language Netflix Gulf War drama Sandcastles, and extensive television work including Narcos and Perry Mason. Carnival Is Over screens in Tallinn having premiered in Toronto, and is slated for release in Brazil in the first quarter of 2025. Elsewhere, the picture could tempt streaming platforms looking for slick foreign-language genre fare.

Coimbra smartly introduces one of the film’s central themes – issues of trust, authenticity and the idea that Valerio and Regina are playing the roles of mafioso power brokers – in an early sequence. Having spent a pleasant afternoon bossing around the labourers working on her extensive home renovation, Regina retires to her bedroom. There she is surprised by a black-clad masked figure wielding a knife. What at first seems to be a robbery takes a sexual turn, which is then revealed to be an erotic role-playing scenario between the couple. A scenario in which Valerio slightly overstepps: “I like knives, not bruises,” scolds his wife afterwards.

But while the physical aspect of their relationship is healthy enough, the financial side is less so. Regina is horrified to learn that her husband is broke and that she must cancel her renovation plans. The couple plans to sell half of the business to their partner, Valerio’s uncle Linduarte (Stepan Nercessian) – a shady individual who may have had something to do with Valerio’s father’s death. But Linduarte has his own plans and Valerio finds himself lumbered with the whole business, complete with yet more debt.

Voluptuous femme fatale Regina shifts into Lady Macbeth mode, encouraging her husband to take increasingly extreme courses of action. But as Valerio settles into the role of mafia boss like a duck to water, a wedge appears between the couple who no longer know who they can trust – including each other. Meanwhile, Regina’s mother is behind the scenes, pulling her daughter’s strings with her own self-interested agenda at play, and a federal investigator is circling, planting seeds of doubt about the trustworthiness of Valerio’s inner circle.

Coimbra makes smart use of the house as a metaphor for the lives of its owners: the polished, freshly painted facade is marked by persistent stains that linger like a guilty conscience. The walls, like the marriage, may look structurally sound, but they hide a multitude of secrets. Most effective, however, is the film’s use of music, which combines sleazy, down-at-heel tenor sax with frenzied samba and drums that rattle like gunfire.