O Pagador de Promessas (1962)

Anselmo Duarte's fable O Pagador de Promessas – which was released in the U.S. (in 1964) as The Given Word – is a semi-comic morality tale about a simple man who tries to keep a promise to a god but who is attacked on all sides by newsmedia, police violence, prostitution, religious intolerance, and capitalist greed.

This film is a moral kind of story with a heart of gold that critiques "modern" life by favoring the "simple" values of honesty, devotion, loyalty, and truth. My scare quotes should indicate that I'm not sure this film believes in modern life as such or in the simple values it would seem to be extolling.

Duarte's film, see, can't help aligning itself with modernity because the film itself is invested in "simple values" as an exercise in nostalgia. What I mean by this is that O Pagador de Promessas is a vehicle through which its director can mourn a set of values or a way of life that Duarte himself believes already to be past – or at least passé. The director is a part of modern life and conservatively or nostalgically orients himself toward these simple values, but the entire premise of the film is from the point of view of modernity.