[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978]
Bahia both is and isn’t the kind of film you’d expect from the maker of Black Orpheus. Like the earlier film, it was made in Brazil and focuses on a society of New World blacks; it is intimately bound up with music and with the joyous dance of life; it boasts sharp National Geographic–style color photography, and a loving sensitivity to the beauty of nature and of the human face; at every turn it stresses rebirth and affirmation, emphasizing the universal human values that are implicit in its amalgam of Christian and Bahian myth. But unlike Black Orpheus, Camus’s newest film is almost structureless, more a freewheeling anthology of vignettes involving the same group of characters than a singleminded narrative film.