He made a good-looking if modestly-budgeted film that takes in exotic sights and avoids the expensive business of staging sea battles and grand palace pageants.īut in trying to immerse us in these utterly alien worlds an under-schooled European encountered on multiple continents, Botelho leaves the viewer almost as much as sea as his hero.Īt times, it’s frustrating just to figure out where in the hell Pinto, stoically played by Cláudio da Silva, is, much less who the hell he’s talking to, negotiating with or bedding.
Portugeuse writer-director João Botelho (“A Corte do Norte”) had the makings of a playful or darkly comic odyssey in tackling this biography or tall tale. You visited the court of Prestor John to help press the case for an alliance against the Turks? Sure. His very motivation for the trip was, this son of the working poor said, sleeping with the wrong woman at court in Lisbon.Īnd the punchline to his life is that while some of what he claimed jibes with the historical record, enough of it seems invented to make it all colorfully and fantastically dubious.
He was shipwrecked and taken hostage repeatedly, found himself in battles with the expansionist Turks and caught up in court intrigues and international diplomacy, far and wide. He sailed from Portugal to become one of the first Europeans to experience Japan, with colorful stops at kingdoms, islands and royal courts from Africa to India, Malaca to Siam (Thailand) and China along the way. Fernão Mendes Pinto was a 16th century Portuguese explorer, adventurer, memoirist and fabulist whose life reads like a conflation of the quests of Cabeza de Vaca or Marco Polo and the picaresque invented misadventures of Baron Munchausen or Harry Flashman.
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