Monsanto
PTSD-ridden ex-soldier goes insane after a partner kills himself.
The name is a reference to the park where the climax happens, from where the poster was extracted. There is no connection to the multinational company.
The plot concerns a soldier still reeling from the colonial war over 20 years back. He lives in a small town with his daughter from a previous marriage and his new wife. Everyone hates each other.
The local beat cop was in the war with the protagonist, but he is completely nuts and soon he takes his own life. This affects the protagonist, so he tries to seek help amongst his old partners in a dinner they organise every year in the big city.
Since his ex-wife (and mother of his child) lives in said big city, her daughter tags along with him and visits her mother. Her mother has a boyfriend and shuns her pretty hard.
Speeding in a buddy’s car to get his daughter, the protagonists relapses into insanity, and believes he is back in the war. The get into a car crash and he goes deep into the woods. Her daughter calls the cops, but a black policeman is dispatched, which plunges him deeply into insanity.
Eventually his daughter catches up to him, but after shooting (non-fatally) the cop, he believes his daughter to be his wife and wants to know her in the biblical sense.
Realising the error of his ways in the last minutes of runtime, he just shoots himself. The end.
This was sold as a “shocking” story since it was produced a few years after the first private TV channel in Portugal started broadcasting, and they wanted to standout as edgy. It’s part of a series of TV films together with A Noiva.
Sounds better than it is.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.