An Unforgettable Year – Autumn is the second film in a four-part Brazilian series produced for Amazon Prime Video based on a best-selling YA book of the same name. The book featured four short stories written by four different Brazilian authors, each based around a season. Novelist Babi Dewet’s story about an autumn romance is actually a musical filled with original songs, fantasy sequences, and a broad, predictable “opposites attract” plot that’s cute but not quite cute enough.
Opening Shot: “Sao Paolo. Almost 13 million inhabitants. This part of my story began here. In autumn,” says our narrator, Anna Julia (played by Brazilian actress and musician Gabz). Anna Julia is about to go in for her final day of work interning at a law firm on the Avenida Paulista, the bustling heart of the city. “Imagine how many dreams you can find here,” she adds.
The Gist: Anna Julia is a young woman who is dead-set on being chosen as the next intern at her law firm. She wants to become a powerful lawyer some day, and she has forgone all of life’s little pleasures to achieve her goal. Her two character traits are:1) Ambitious! 2) HATES MUSIC! Joao Paolo (Lucas Leto) is the street musician who turns her life upside down with his music, which SHE HATES, and his good looks.
Anna Julia lives with her dad (her mother, Pattie, is still alive, but her number is blocked in Anna Julia’s phone, eventually we learn that her mom abandoned the family to pursue her own music career. Hence why Anna Julia HATES MUSIC!), and she’s competing with several other interns to win an extension to continue working at her law firm. To impress her boss, Sophia, she starts working undercover at a local shelter that’s been squatting in an abandoned building in order to feed her boss information about the inner workings there. While she volunteers at the squat, she comes to love the people there. Anna thinks her boss will be taking the shelter on as a pro bono client (but the reality is, Sophia and the law firm are working for the building’s owner instead, who wants to evict the squatters).
Meanwhile Joao Paolo, JP for short, is trying to enter a music competition, but he’s struggling because up until now, he’s only been in cover bands, he has never written original music. But after he meets Anna Julia, all the song lyrics that flow out of him are about her. After the two run into each other twice, they decide it’s fate and go on a date where they hit it off. But of course there’s conflict because he’s following his artistic passions, he’s scruffy and unpredictable, and Anna Julia cannot be distracted by someone who doesn’t have his shit together. Eventually, when he makes her look bad in front of her boss by calling her throughout a meeting, she breaks it off.
Anna Julia learns that she’s been chosen to stay on as her firm’s intern, but when she realizes that they’re working to evict the squatters, she shames them for their behavior. She eventually has a come to Jesus moment with her estranged mother, realizes that she gave up her principles and her true self for her internship, and for what!? So she quits her job, brings her mother to JP’s performance at the music festival, and they all live happily ever after. This film is pretty predictable, and from the moment it began, I jokingly told myself I would end this review by writing “And guess what?! Anna Julia loves music now!” Reader…
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Much like An Unforgettable Year – Summer, this film features a sweet, seasonal romance and a character who really hates music and fun (why?!), so that’s the clear comparison.
Our Take: There’s a lot of good music in An Unforgettable Year – Autumn; the cast are all talented singers and the songs that help move the plot along are sung competently, but like many old fashioned musicals that came before it, this film relies on stereotypes to tell the story. Anna Julia is so rigid and stuck in her ways, even her own father who was also abandoned by her mother, thinks she’s being too hard on her mom. We learn that the security guards in Anna’s office building won’t let JP in to see her because he’s “weird-looking.” And by that, I mean he’s literally dressed in street clothes.
And of course, of course, everything ends exactly the way you think it will. Like, it’s so predictable that even the chatbots are like, guys, this is the best you could do?
Anna Julia forgives her mother for leaving the family once she realizes that her mother, like her, was ambitious and refused to give up on her dreams. Anna and JP both realize their love for music, and each other, and they express their love in song together in the final credits.
Sex and Skin: Some making out and implied, but unseen, sex.
Parting Shot: JP, Anna Julia, and the rest of the cast take to the streets of Sao Paolo for one last music number that celebrates love, family, Brazil, and, yes, MUSIC.
Sleeper Star: Bukassa Kabengele stars as Anna Julia’s father Guilherme, and thanks to his performance, Guilherme is one of the only truly nuanced characters in the film who isn’t a broad archetype. Though he’s not ambitious and he butts heads with Anna Julia, he’s her conscience, helping her to see that life is about more than just work, it’s about family and forgiveness, too.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I was working, don’t you understand what that means?” Anna Julia tells JP when he asks her why she wouldn’t speak to him on the phone. Because she’s serious about work and he’s artsy and doesn’t understand what work is!
Our Call: SKIP IT. There are so many fun musical performances in the film that are worth watching, but this is a case of the full movie being less than the sum of its parts. The film is a sweet romance that suffers from broad stereotypes and predictability, it contains are good songs that often feel shoehorned into scenes, and there’s an interesting story buried in Anna Julia’s family relationships with her parents that could have been developed even further. Unfortunately, it those feel like three distinct elements that don’t all harmonize perfectly together.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.