Pope's Toilet

[AfroPixFlix]

The protagonist and his buddy are destitute smugglers, loading untaxed groceries and contraband from Brazil on their bicycles and lugging them across the border into Uruguay. When Pope John Paul is slated to visit their poor enclave, the peasant folk in their village bet their small savings on making a tidy mint selling chorizo and toilet privileges (thus the title) to the thousands of visitors who’ll assuredly flock in from Brazil. Nice film, almost with an O. Henry tragedy-irony tone in it, but it’s just too long. Ninety-eight minutes after watching the film, you’ll wonder where the extra ninety minutes went. Better editing would have left us with a cleaner film with more of an impact. Some subplots, like the daughter’s fragmented dream of becoming a television reporter, could have been sacrificed in favor of developing the growing disillusionment of the wife of the main character. It’s a charming, but protracted look into cinema from an unusual locale, meriting a couple of picks from AfroPixFlix. Pooper