Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Carnaval’ on Netflix, a Brazilian ‘Girls Trip’ Wannabe Set at the World’s Biggest Party

Let’s examine how Netflix movie Carnaval tries to lure us in: Attractive people in bathing suits, a gorgeous seaside setting and its potential to be a Brazilian Girls Trip. It’s about four best lady pals taking a VIP vacay to Carnival, a.k.a. the world’s biggest party, where they find love and laughs and reasons to squabble and bond and look fabulosa AF. Will it provide escape in its depiction of a megabash with millions crowded together in the streets in a COVID-free alternate reality, or will it just make us feel like we got too much sand in our grundies while we were at the beach?

CARNAVAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nina (Giovana Cordeiro) is an influencer on the way up. But it’s not easy — she has 327,000 Instagram followers, which means she’s eating ramen noodles, taking the bus and dreaming of getting to a million. Her happiness goes straight into the crapper when her boyfriend, a set of abs with a head on top of them, and who we meet as he’s totally SMASHING his LATS at the gym, dumps her for some bimbo with only 1,437 followers. THE HORROR. He’s OBVIOUSLY a superficial cretin! Nina does some pouty posts, which rouses the concern of her best friends: Mayra (Bruna Inocencio), a sweetheart with agoraphobia; Michelle (Gessica Kayane), who makes out with just about any human male with a pulse; and Vivi (Samya Pascotto), a geekus who won’t kiss a dude who can’t answer her Harry Potter and Back to the Future trivia questions. I’m sure these people have other personality traits, but why would be interested in those dumb things? Whaddaya think this is, some boring piece of Oscar bait?

To compound Nina’s misery, her breakup resulted in a viral meme labeling her the Crossfit Cuckold. But fate picks her up, because even though she’s utterly embarrassed, she’s still very good looking, and I think that’s why she scores an invite to Salvador for Carnival as the guest of Freddy Nunes (Micael), a pop singer whose current smash hit features the lyric, “getting intimate with the booty” (maybe something’s lost in the translation from Portugeuse to English?). Nina finagles the deal so she can bring Mayra, Michelle and Vivi, and there’s much cacophonous squealing and jabbering and gesticulating, because that’s what human beings making would-be funny movies about human beings think human beings in would-be funny movies do.

So the ladies pack several dozen outfits each and venture to Salvador, where body hair is at such a premium, one assumes its removal is a regional mandate. It goes not so well before it gets better and then worse and then better and worse and then finally better, because that’s the way these types of movies go. Turns out the premium resort is only for influencers with a million followers, so they’re stuck at the crappy resort where children run up to you and just blast you with squirt guns for no reason. We meet some ancillary characters: Salvador (Jean Pedro) is their host, and he has eyes for Nina, which might clash with Freddy’s plan to make her his PR girlfriend but not his real girlfriend, something that makes her sad but will get her massive heaps and shitpiles of followers. Luana (Flavia Pavanelli) is a snooty mega-influencer and Nina’s idol, and she tells Nina to ditch her baggage-y friends if she wants to succeed as a social media star. Sounds like terrific advice and not at all a reason to introduce meaningless conflict to the plot! Meanwhile, Vivi meets a fellow geekoid, Michelle may have found love instead of just another lust object and Mayra might just have an opportunity to overcome her fear of crowds without spending thousands on therapy, which I’m pretty sure is exactly how it works in real life. Will this mess end up all tidy by the time it’s over? I’m not gonna get intimate with the spoilers!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is another instance of a movie sucking Girls Trip vapor trails, just like Ibiza and Desperados before it.

Performance Worth Watching: Cordeiro has the type of genial presence that could carry a rom-com that’s better written and less concerned with wacky hijinks than this one.

Memorable Dialogue: Michelle gets honked off when Nina deems her quest for followers to be more valuable than quality girl-bonding time: “Go to hell. And don’t forget to ping your location!”

Sex and Skin: None beyond all the beef and cheesecake peeking out from behind skimpy-skimpy bathing suits.

Our Take: Carnaval is one of those movies that’s trying so hard to be funny that it’s not funny. The effort is all up there on the screen, where the cast flails and mugs and gibbers in an attempt to liven up a screenplay that’s shallower than a half-filled shot glass. The characters are cliches, the jokes are cliches, the situations are cliches. As for the film’s assertion that life should be experienced with flesh and blood friends and lovers and not through a smartphone screen? Also a cliche. A big, dumb, fat, obvious one, and I’d say the movie’s talking down to us if it was smart enough to realize what it’s doing, which I don’t think it is.

Visually, the film should be several eyefuls of pretty people and scenery, but it doesn’t sit still long enough to let us appreciate the beauty. It’s as if it was edited for brevity instead of clarity, coming off as a blur of costumes and sun-leavened locales driven by breathless recitations of dialogue and perfunctory plot developments. The storytelling here is choppy and disjointed, gracelessly hopping from scene to scene. The comedy and sentiment briefly finds traction in a sequence where Salvador takes Nina and co. away from the fakeoid glamor of the party scene for a tour of the city, so they can taste the salt of the earth. But the moment is fleeting, because this movie is more concerned with looking good than actually being good.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Ironically, Carnaval wants to like, say something about superficiality and stuff, but never really gets beneath the surface of its characters or situations.

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 Carnaval on Netflix