Review: O Natal do Bruno Aleixo

Back in ~2008 Bruno Aleixo became famous in the underground Brazilian internet culture with its weird sketches that were streets ahead of what we knew.

Bruno Aleixo and Busto (which is literally a bust statue of Napoleon) playing Street Fighter 2 is still to this day one of the funniest things I’ve seen, and still lives in a lots of people’s collective memory. For a quick reference, when I told a friend I was going to see his movie, he promptly asked: “is that the guy from the Street Fighter sketch?”.

Admittedly, part of the awe is due to their European Portuguese pronunciation, which is not something we usually consume in Brazil - differently from the US/UK, which have a more bilateral relationship - although, with the trend of Brazilian teams hiring Portuguese Football Coaches, this has been changing.

However, recently, even before I came to live here in Portugal, I’ve started revisiting his work and yes, there’s way lot more than simply “funny Portuguese characters speaking silly things”. There’s a bit of irony, social commentary, daily life and of course, a lot of absurdity.

Back in 2020, in Brazil, I watched his first film, literally called “Bruno Aleixo’s Movie” (“O Filme do Bruno Aleixo”) in the São Paulo Cultural Center in a session with about 30 people for a very cheap price (it was something like ~0.30 USD, really cheap!). It was a fun experience, but since it was so cheap, you end up with people in the audience that don’t really know what they are doing there and don’t really get the humor. I remember laughing at some jokes while the whole room was dead. And being silent while the room was laughing, most likely due to a more straightforward joke. There’s a whole discussion to be had about this sometime, but in Brazil a more on-your-face/the-same-joke-over-and-over-again is pretty common.

In any case, we went to the Cinema Fernando Lopes (part of the Universidade Lusófona) to watch Bruno’s Aleixo Christmas. It’s an interesting place, where they screen more cult movies. For example, they are screening the flicks by japanese Director Hirokazu Kore-eda this week. In case you don’t know, he directed Shoplifters, one of my favourite movies ever.

Anyway, we were really looking forward watching that movie with the “home field advantage”. We wanted to see how Portuguese people (and Portuguese fans) would react to its jokes. And boy, oh boy, we got more than we expected. Right at the beginning of the movie, there were some girls behind us bursting out laughing, and I still don’t know whether they were high as hell or simply found those jokes so incredible funny.

The movie itself is fine, basically Bruno Aleixo gets into a coma and his psychologist tries to revive him by presenting different characters telling different stories of their experiences with Bruno, which really is just an excuse to have different sketches.

Each sketch has a different animation style, which is cool since it gives jobs to more people and makes each sketch feel fresh. I am not too much into animation so I can’t provide a more sophisticated review, but while I can notice the budget isn’t the highest, there’s nothing that makes it look UGLY, which is a victory in my book.

The text is still pretty funny, which its already classic awkward silence moments, weird social situations, people dissing each other and so on. By the way, I wasn’t expecting the Homem do Bussaco (a Sasquatch basically) to make such an impact! This is interesting, because for us Brazilians it’s super difficult to understand him, and I guess it’s the same for other people as well, since he’s the only character to have subtitles. But you can definitely tell what he’s saying, and part of the joke is that the subtitles show a more euphemistic version of what he’s saying, which is way more acid.

There’s one part where the sketch passes in Brazil, it was still funny but you could see the audience wasn’t much into it or its jokes. Weird.

Right after the screening the producers and some animators discussed about the making of the movie. I have to say I wasn’t super interested, especially because it was Wednesday late (~11 pm) and we were hungry.

Overall it was a fun experience, although we couldn’t fully understand all the jokes and their implications. I would like to revisit it in the future, after I get to understand more the culture here.

My final review is: I liked it and would watch it again in the future.