The Cinematheque

“More than a storyline, what runs between Yellow House and its ​‘sequel’ is a mood and style: microscopic gags, epic runtimes, erratic plots, perfectly snipped-off long takes, and dreamy sensuality.”

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

“A film against established order,” in director João César Monteiro’s words, God’s Comedy is a popular movie: its exacting, suspenseful portioning of perversity, normalcy, and voyeuristic beauty is displayed with total awareness of its audience’s likely repulsion or acceptance. João de Deus, after the events of Recollections of the Yellow House, is now the manager of the Paradise ice cream parlour. From his position of authority he strictly enforces a particular sense of taste, of what he sells and who he hires, and what he (coldly) says and (pleasurably) does in his spare time. One could call him a Captain Ahab figure: as Moby Dick is to the sperm whale, so God’s Comedy is likewise near-encyclopedic regarding the uses and values of ice cream. Variations on Monteiro’s João persona would appear in all of his remaining films, but the audaciousness—of gloriously surreal mise-en-scène and moral code shattering—was never more game than in this neighbourhood-scaled epic.

One of the Greatest Portuguese Films of All Time (#6)
filmSPOT Critics Poll (2020)

“Treats the polymorphously perverse as if it were a sacred ritual … Monteiro generates a poetic and deeply provocative confusion between the sacred and the profane.”

Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive