Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rich in Love’ on Netflix, in Which the Heir to a Tomato Fortune Pretends to Be Poor to Get the Girl

One of Netflix’s latest international movie endeavors is Rich in Love (Ricos de Amor), a Brazilian rom-com about a rich guy who pretends to be a poor guy to see if people love him for his money or for who he is. If this sounds like a cornball trope to you, well, you’re right. But maybe this version of it is charming nonetheless.

RICH IN LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Teto (Danilo Mequita) is the heir to a massive tomato fortune. No, that’s not a typo. His father (Ernani Moraes) is a muhfuhn tomato MAGNATE, with labs to engineer tomatoes, a mansion on a tomato farm and a whole tomato corporation. In the opening scene, the old man is giving a tour of the greenhouse to some investors and invites them to check out their new marketing endeavor, a tomato juice fountain, and opens the door to find sauce-smeared couple having sex in the fountain. It is quite the comic scene, I tell you.

Cut to ONE MONTH EARLIER. Teto wakes up next to last night’s random female conquest (she is NOT a tomato, you jerks), and makes his best pal Igor (Jaffar Bambirra), who’s the son of the tomato groundskeepers, send her away. This is routine. It’s his birthday, and tonight at the Tomato Festival, Mr. Tomato Prince will celebrate with a massive tomato fight and a concert at which thousands of tomato fiends will listen to a rapping DJ rap about — tomatoes? Is there anything else worth rapping about?

It’s at this tomatopalooza that Igor and Teto have a tiff. Igor calls him on his rich-guy privilege: He takes things for granted, doesn’t work hard (or at all, actually) and is an arrogant, smug, womanizing jerkoff who needs a Jurassic comeuppance. (That last one is my assessment.) The convo comes in handy when Teto meets Paula (Giovanna Lancellotti). How do they meet, you might ask? Do I need to tell you he throws a tomato at her? I don’t. You just jumped to that conclusion, and you were absolutely right. Anyway, Teto lies to her and tells her he’s poor, which means some games will need to be played when they go out on dates and she inevitably wants to go back to his place.

Concurrently, Teto and Igor engage in an even more cockamamie scheme: Nobody knows Teto at International Amalgamated Tomato Conglomerates Inc. corporate headquarters, so he vows to start at the bottom as a trainee instead of letting his dad hand him a cushy job. The twist is, he and Igor will pretend to be each other so each can understand what it’s like to be the other. This absurd scenario entangles Monique (Lelle), a junior exec who gets fired and platonically befriends Teto, and Alana (Fernanda Paes Leme), the cougarish tomato-trainee coordinator. Meanwhile, Paula just finished med school and hopes to land a residency at a hospital where a handsy doctor keeps sexually harassing her, so her friends and fellow almost-doctors Raissa (Bruna Griphao) and Katia (Jeniffer Dias) slip him the occasional mickey in his coffee to slow him down. This is a recipe for pandemonium, people. PANDEMONIUM.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Considering the convoluted ruse, the misunderstandings, the wacky supporting characters and break-up-and-make-up plot, Rich in Love brings to mind pretty much every rom-com that exists.

Performance Worth Watching: Lancellotti exhibits the strongest screen presence among the cast, although it helps to be playing the only character in the screenplay who isn’t a twit.

Memorable Dialogue: “Getting canned was much worse,” Monique says after she falls over a turnstyle on her way out the building. Get it? She was “canned”? From a tomato company?

Sex and Skin: Nothing much beyond a handful of suggestive and nigh-abstract shots of tomato-smearing on bodies.

Our Take: Don’t fall behind in this screwball plot, or you might not be able to KETCHUP. And you might feel screwed by it after you watch it, as Rich in Love is the same old rom-com junk — except with tomatoes. There’s always a gimmick.

A significant chunk of this movie is a Range Rover ad with travelogue cinematography. Another, larger part of it consists of Teto and Igor bending over backwards to keep their ruse from falling apart, culminating in a precarious sequence in which Teto tries to be in two places at once, and is accidentally slipped the mickey intended for the handsy doctor, and he sings a romantic song for Paula but steps in a bonfire, and he keeps having to change his clothes, and enduring such fever-pitch wackiness makes a body want to throw rotten CABBAGES at the screen. Yes. CABBAGES.

I had some sympathy for Paula, who’s a competent, intelligent and earnest human being trapped in a dopey-ass screenplay. The romantic mash-scenes she and Teto share aren’t half-bad, but their sincerity is diluted by a conglomeration of dumb subplots and minor characters. We just don’t get to know the principals well enough to get past an unyielding barrage of tomato and tomato-adjacent bullshit.

Our Call: SKIP IT. This plant yields very little viable fruit.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Rich in Love on Netflix