Jumping from realist comedy to caper film to wish-fulfillment fantasy, Jorge Furtado's The Man Who Copied offers three movies for the price of one, but they don't necessarily make much sense together. The twists and turns are more jarring than exhilarating, and by the end, the characters seem oddly less familiar and worthy of sympathy, because they weren't the lovable downtrodden heroes they appeared to be. And their betrayal goes hand-in-hand with the movie's dubious message that it's okay to rob, cheat, and even kill, so long as you look cute doing it and it helps bring your moony daydreams to fruition. When those daydreams are being hatched during the first hour, the film has a sweetness and charm that's undercut nicely by a sliver of class hostility, as the lowly hero seeks to better his station in life. It's just the way he goes about it that makes him a different person, and The Man Who Copied a different movie.
The darkly charismatic Lázaro Ramos, who lit up 2002's Madame Satã with a tenacious lead performance, shows a gentler, self-effacing side as the title character, a lowly 19-year-old photocopier-operator in Porto Alegre, Brazil. A dropout with no real prospects, Ramos educates himself by reading passages from books he copies, and he spends a lot of time doodling a cartoon about a one-eyed boy and a schoolmarm who looks like Eleanor Roosevelt. At night, he trains his binoculars on the building across the street, spying on pretty young Leandra Leal, who works as a clerk in a clothing boutique. Ramos tries to impress Leal by buying a $38 nightgown for his mother, but since he doesn't have money, he decides to improvise by counterfeiting a $50 bill on the new color copier. To his amazement, the scheme pays off, but that small taste of criminality only creates a larger appetite, and soon enough, he considers knocking off an armored truck.
Though it's possible to read The Man Who Copied as a fantasy about upward mobility by any means necessary, Ramos and the other characters by no stretch qualify as the poorest of the Brazilian poor. Their actions later in the film stem from greed rather than desperation. The silly twist ending only underlines the point that the film was better off at the beginning, as a quirky romantic comedy between two likeable people whose stars have yet to align. There's at least one good movie in The Man Who Copied's 124 minutes, but Furtado never settles on it.