Est?mago: A Gastronomic Story

In the great restaurant of life, there are those who eat and those who get eaten. Raimundo Nonato (joדo Miguel) finds an alternative way, a life of his own: he cooks. It happens by chance, mainly it is destiny. It happens in order to survive and find a place in society - alongside the others, the "real men"- although Nonato has nothing in common with the others; still, he must learn to live among them. He arrives to town, on a coach bus, without a penny in his pockets and starts working as help in a decadent bar, a nasty place, lost amid the urban desert. He sleeps in the storage room on the back, and under a cold neon light learns how to fry "pastel" and "coxinhas", outdoing his "master", Zulmiro (Zeca Cenovicz), the owner of the bar. Nonato is ignorant, but talented. He knows how to work the kitchen, soon others realize it too. The first one to notice him, is Iria (Fabiula Nascimento), a prostitute, who doesn't know how to cook but loves to eat, Nonato's coxinhas are enough to seduce her, she starts an affair with him, where she provides sex in exchange for food (a primitive relationship bargain, some would say). Then, Giovanni (Carlo Briani) the owner of the Boccaccio - an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood - offers Nonato a job as his apprentice, assistant, to teach him his know-how on culinary art using a highly rhetoric form of speech. Nonato's talent doesn't go unnoticed in prison, among his jail mates - whom we meet through a series of flash forwards. For the prisoners and their boss, the violent Bujiש (Babu Santana), Nonato is a savior; in fact soon their meager meals turn to a feast of exotic dishes orchestrated by Nonato's magic. As a consequence of this, Nonato is given the following the nickname, a well suited one indeed: Rosemary. How the he ends up in jail - especially, the reason behind his imprisonment - is concealed to us. We keep wondering why, up until the end, when we discover his crime, the crime committed by an ordinary man, clever of a cleverness proper to simple men, who knows how to endear the powerful by submitting to their strength, their aptitude for physical violence as well as their violence of speech, a simple man who by his character and survival instinct is capable of unpredictable deeds. In the great restaurant that is life, even the cook wants to eat his share. After all, only the cook truly knows which part is the best. Estפmago is an adult fable on power, sex and cooking.