Estômago: A Gastronomic Story

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1h 52m | Drama

Raimundo Nonato arrives to town on a bus, without a penny in his pockets. He starts working as help in a decadent bar, a nasty place, lost amid the urban desert. He sleeps in the storage room on the back, and under a cold neon light learns how to fry "pastel" and "coxinhas," outdoing the owner of the bar. Nonato is ignorant, but talented. He knows how to work the kitchen, soon others realize it too.

The first one to notice him is Iria, a prostitute, who doesn't know how to cook but loves to eat. She starts an affair with Raimundo, providing sex in exchange for food. Then, Giovanni, the owner of an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, offers Raimundo a job as his apprentice, to teach him his know-how on culinary art using a highly.

Raimundo finds himself in prison. For the prisoners and their boss, the violent Bujiù, Nonato is a savior; in fact soon their meager meals turn to a feast of exotic dishes orchestrated by Raimundo's magic. As a consequence of this, Raimundo is given the following the nickname, a well suited one indeed: Rosemary.

How Raimundo ends up in jail—especially, the reason behind his imprisonment—is concealed to us. We keep wondering why, up until the end, when we discover his crime, the crime committed by an ordinary man, clever of a cleverness proper to simple men, who knows how to endear the powerful by submitting to their strength, their aptitude for physical violence as well as their violence of speech, a simple man who by his character and survival instinct iscapable of unpredictable deeds. In the great restaurant that is life, even the cook wants to eat his share. After all, only the cook truly knows which part is the best.