When she first appears on screen, visibly pregnant and draped in a tattered wedding gown, Regina Casé looks like a stereotypical noble sufferer, a full-bodied heroine with broad shoulders to bear life's perpetual burdens. Her mother, who appears to be on her deathbed, warns her ominously against having a daughter, and when Casé shows up at the church to be married, the groom is a predictable no-show. Throughout Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington's slight but appealing comedy Me You Them, Casé finds hardship waiting around every corner, yet she continually surprises with her ability to eke out pleasure wherever she can find it. Based on a true story, Waddington's gently ironic and seductively picturesque tale of female empowerment centers on an impoverished mother of four children by four different fathers, none of whom married her. To add to the complications, three of the men wind up living under her roof, but Casé somehow manages to promote harmony, even joy, in the seemingly disastrous arrangement. After spending three years away with her first child, she returns to her village and casually accepts a marriage proposal from Lima Duarte, an older man who promises her little more than shelter. Their arrangement amounts to something close to indentured servitude, with Casé toiling in the sugarcane fields all day and waiting on her layabout husband the rest of the time. But she soon unburdens herself, as Duarte's timid, sensitive cousin Stênio Garcia moves in and takes over most of the housework—including the care of her newborn son, whose skin is conspicuously blacker than her husband's. Moved by his quiet devotion to her, Casé has yet another son with Garcia, but even his love is set aside when a handsome young laborer (Luís Carlos Vasconcelos) is invited to join the burgeoning household. At times, Me You Them seems primed to explode into a neo-realist variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice, but Waddington is more interested in exploring how his heroine navigates an intensely patriarchal environment so smoothly. Moving along to the effortless rhythms of Tropicalia legend Gilberto Gil's lovely score, the film shuns melodrama to such an extent that it carries little emotional gravity or thematic depth. But, on the strength of Casé's enormous charisma, Me You Them makes even a dire situation seem like a pleasant, life-affirming diversion.