[rating=7.00]
I’ve never seen a romantic comedy quite like Neurotic Quest for Serenity. To wit: We open on a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A young woman runs from a group of crazed, blood thirsty ravagers, to no avail. She is cornered, all hope lost. At the final moment, a mysterious heroine rises from the shadows. Bow and arrow in hand, she shoots the testicles off the head ravager, and cuts the head off another. The young woman is saved, thanks to the efforts of the justice seeking stranger.
It’s all a dream, of course, an outlet for soap opera actress Kika K.’s (Tata Werneck) growing sense of existential malaise and ennui. But it sets a nice tone, giving us an immediate insight into the mind of our main character, and letting us know exactly what we’ve gotten ourselves into. It’s a far from perfect film, but it’s a film that’s bold in its choices, and effortlessly unafraid to explore the absurdities of modern existence.
On the surface of things, Kika is not a character who is instantly relatable. She’s super famous, dates famous men, lives lavishly. It’s easy to dismiss her problems because of her privilege, but the film, and Werneck’s performance, put in hard work to depict Kika as a sort of tragicomic character. It doesn’t take long to see that she a woman who is unhappy in her core and wracked by angst over her life choices and current trajectory. In this sense, Kika is so like all of us, wealth and privilege be damned.
Co-writers/directors Paulinho Caruso and Teodoro Poppovic have crafted a film that aims high and hits its marks more often than not. The script is often as bold and wild as the intro described above—in fact, the post-apocalyptic dreamscape appears several times over the course of the film, serving as a kind of Greek chorus giving insight into Kika’s psychological development—and her adventures in finding herself are mined for great moments of absurd comedy.
Like all of us, Kika just wants to love and be loved, and settle into a sense of security in her direction. Her quest is, arguably, the quest we’re all on and, in that sense, the only quest that matters. She is a woman imprisoned by her life, and the drastic measures she takes to break herself out of her rut are familiar and quite often hilarious.
In the end, this is a film about finding happiness. Or rather, about learning that happiness isn’t something that you can necessarily find. Instead, it’s something that you can only hope to be brave enough to accept whenever it might let itself be known, and having the courage to grab on to it and hold tight, even if it’s just for a few fleeting moments.
