Netflixable? “A Woman with No Filter” has some Grievances to Air

In the tradition of “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “It’s My Turn,” and generations of women coming into their own in films comes “A Woman with No Filter,” a Brazilian comedy that covers familiar ground at an unamusing crawl.

Our put-uoon title character, Bia, runs an online magazine where she’s gone a decade without a raise from her BMW-buying boss. She has the burden of bucking up her “work husband,” a close colleague engaged to a rich beauty who pushes him around.

Bia has an artist/husband who won’t get a real job during his creative block and can’t be bothered to answer the door to get the wifi or whatever breaks fixed in their apartment. His son is a school-skipping slacker/stoner punk.

Their neighbor is a 40ish aspiring DJ who throws house parties every night — basically running a noisy nightclub in their building, something the cops and her building super let her get away with.

Her cat-lady sister leans on her to cat-sit because she’s apparently got no friends. There’s this one giant SUV-driving society type who never lets Bia merge into traffic every morning while driving to work.

And her bestie is too busy cyber-stalking her ex to hear Bia out when all she wants to do is vent about all the “other” difficult” people in her life.

What sets Bia (Fabiula Nascimento) off isn’t the half-her-age “influencer” Paloma (Camila Queiroz) her dead-weight-publisher (Caito Mainier) hires to “supervise” her. It’s not Paloma’s “my team” airs and dismissal of journalistic essays in favor of “a single quote” from celebrities, accompanied by a “reel” video to distract the readers.

It’s Paloma’s cooing insistence that what Bia really needs is a visit to “Goddess Vagina” (Molly Marinho), a combination masseuse, seer and shaman whose diagnosis and “treatment” causes Bia to “turn into the Hulk” (in Portuguese with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

About 70 minutes of this 92 minute comedy is a pretty good actress (Nascimento starred in “A Wolf at the Door”) cussing out the influencer, her “misogynistic idiot” boss, her best friend (Patricia Ramos) and on down the line.

The most entertaining of these meltdowns involves Bia sabotaging her arrogant, inconsiderate neighbor’s unlicensed night club DJ ambitions. The rest is a string of static, less-than-amusing shout-downs, broadly played, that show how Goddess Vagina “liberated” Bia from being the nice, compliant and put-upon woman that she’s always been.

Yes, she has her reasons and yes, they all have it coming and of course things will resolve themselves in the most mild-mannered, wish-fulfillment-fantasy ways.

Which isn’t exactly a formula for a winning comedy, even a “predictable” one.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Fabiula Nascimento, Camila Queiroz, Louise D’Tuani, Emilio Dantas,
Luana Martau, Júlia Rabello, Patricia Ramos, Caito Mainier, Samuel de Assis and Polly Marinho

Credits: Directed by Arthur Fontes, scripted by Tati Bernardi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Unknown's avatar

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
This entry was posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.