'Divine Love' is a strange film: it begins as a vaguely sci-fi tale when we meet Joana, a woman who lives in the Brazil of 2027. It is a society where people's lives are documented and bar-coded to the nth degree: a person's marital status - and in the case of women, whether or not they are pregnant - are automatically detected and displayed for all to see when entering buildings. Joana and her husband are members of a religious group (the eponymous 'Divine Love') that encourages free love. But despite frequent sexual couplings with a variety of partners, Joana, to the couple's disappointment, never falls pregnant. When that situation changes, however, the film shifts to become more of a religious allegory.

I saw this at the 2019 London Film Festival (LFF), the programme of which included many films about people obsessing over having babies. If Joana's treatment of a litter of puppies is any indication of her caring instincts, I would not let her anywhere near a child, but animal cruelty aside it is hard not to feel sympathy for her, as actress Dira Paes gives the character dignity even in scenes shared with a cheesy 'drive-thru' pastor (Emílio de Melo in a gift of a role that he sensibly treats subtly rather than playing for belly laughs).

I am not sure I need to watch this again, but it was certainly worth watching once. I just hope the LFF programmers choose fewer baby-obsessive films next year...

Not properly bad but a little frustrating. I expected a much deeper and encompassing distopy but I saw some nice ideas loosely connected without a clear understanding of what the movie is about. Acting is good (Dira Paes is always awesome), the film is visually nice too, the fururistic Brazil seems credible (with the advance of Neo-Pentecostal fundamentalism over national institutions) but lacks desirable information for espectators, and there is much more explicit (and convincing) sex in the film than I could imagine.

With a toughtless "art movie" aesthetic" Divino Amor tries to be a mix of equal parts Il Deserto Rosso and Love but ends up being infinitely inferior to both and overrall just insufficient. The film is 100 minutes long but it should've been 80 at most since there are a lot of absolutely unnecessary scenes that add absolutely nothing to the plot. Even though the film is bloated, that does not keep it from being underexplained and underdeveloped; The dystopian universe presented is shallow and colorless(not literally since the film indulges itself in a constant use of artificial lightning to achieve its pink/purple tone), we only see the lead character's office , a drive thru prayer station and the evangelical swing therapy thing. The film is basicly the lead going from one to the other countless times . The "social commentary" behind the film is absolutely ambiguous and unthought of as it starts as a brazillian evangelical dystopia and ends up as a yet another one christian vague metaphor films in which it just touches a delicate and complex subject without adding absolutely nothing to it; In this case the rebirth of christ, all it shows us is that it happened, that nobody believed her and that christ is a girl but that is about it. The ending is really unsatisfactory and seems forced, the lead's husband acts uncharacteristically irrational as the film delights itself in making the lead not explain what happened and instead speak in riddles to make sure the late conflict actually happens. Divino Amor is one of those films were you are tricked into thinking it has a lot to say but midway through it you end up realizing that it really doesn't.