The basic situation is a combustible one. A political prisoner named Valentin shares a cell with a homosexual pederast named Molina in an unnamed Latin American country. The homosexual, who is eventually revealed to have been bribed by prison officials to worm information out of his cellmate, but by then has developed a genuine bond with the man, helps to pass the time, as well as to get the conversational ball rolling, by recounting the plot of his favorite old movie: a Nazi propaganda piece in the form of a Casablanca-like thriller, with all the Hollywood clichés of World War II turned topsy-turvy. The overt political content there, and Molina's willful blindness to it, will automatically settle the matter for some people: those, for example, who can't see past the jackboots and swastikas of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. And the issues which gave so much polemical spark to Manuel Puig's original novel, Camp aesthetics vs. social consciousness, fantasy vs. reality, style vs. content, will never get off the ground. Perhaps the issues might still have emerged if the depicted film-within-the-film were a sufficiently shining example of the gloss and glamour of the Forties. But it is not. Aside from the fact that it is a German and not a Hollywood production, the storyline of the thing, what we can glean of it, exercises no pull of its own, is more a row of ice cubes than an onrushing river, a flipbook of stock situations and tableau-like poses, hardly the sort of thing we would be anxious to get back to after interruptions, as dull and static in its own way as prison itself. With William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sonia Braga; directed by Hector Babenco. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd