Edmilson Filho
Edmilson Filho: Notas, Comedy about Relationships
2018
1h 19m
15 · PortugueseDirector: Halder Gomes
Overview
Brazilian comedian Edmilson Filho walks his audience through the stages of a modern relationship, playing up the differences between men and women.
Cast
Reviews
5 min readThe Loneliness of the Stand-Up Philosopher
I’ve seen this trick before. A comedian steps out from behind the microphone, trades the spotlight for a camera, and decides to teach us something about love. The formula is as old as Woody Allen’s neurotic monologues, as recent as Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette—a blend of humor and heartache, delivered with the promise that laughter might soften the blow of hard truths.
latestnetflix.com's view is that Edmilson Filho: Notas, Comedy about Relationships follows this well-trod path, but with a twist: it’s less a film than a one-man show stretched to feature length, a 79-minute stand-up set dressed in the thinnest of narrative guises.
The question isn’t whether it’s funny—sometimes it is—but whether it earns the emotional weight it so desperately wants to carry.
Edmilson Filho, a Brazilian comedian with a face built for expressive despair, plays himself, or at least a version of himself. The film’s conceit is simple: he’s a man reflecting on the absurdities of modern romance, the push-and-pull between men and women, the way love curdles into resentment, and how we’re all just stumbling through it with varying degrees of grace. The problem isn’t the material—relationships are an endless well of comedy and tragedy—but the delivery.
Filho’s schtick leans heavily on broad physical comedy, exaggerated facial expressions, and a kind of performative bewilderment that feels borrowed from a silent film star. There’s a moment where he mimes being strangled by an invisible force, his eyes bulging, tongue lolling, as if to say, See? This is what love does to me. It’s the kind of bit that works in small doses, in a club where the energy of the crowd can carry it.
Here, stretched over nearly 80 minutes, it starts to feel like watching someone practice their act in an empty room.
That’s the film’s central tension: it wants to be both a comedy and a meditation on love, but it never quite commits to either. The stand-up segments are intercut with what passes for narrative—a series of vignettes where Filho interacts with women (played by a rotating cast of actresses) in scenarios that range from awkward to mildly amusing. In one, he’s on a date where the woman spends the entire meal talking about her ex.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsFortaleza filled the Art Deco house. Then Netflix took the notes.
Cineteatro Sao Luiz holds about a thousand people. Art Deco, listed as Ceara heritage since 1991, the room Cearense film people keep coming back to. In September 2017 Edmilson Filho taped Notas, Uma Comedia de Relacionamentos there for Halder Gomes. O Povo's Rubens Rodrigues wrote that the house was full on the back of Cine Holliudy and Shaolin do Sertao, both with Gomes directing and Filho starring. latestnetflix.com's view is that the monologue came from a run of posts about men and women at each stage of a relationship.IMDb lists Filho as writer, Gomes as director, 79 minutes.,,,
The notes were already a stage show. Portuguese Wikipedia puts Notas on his theatre list for 2016 and 2017, after Made in Ceara, the piece he built with Gomes once he had lived in the United States and clocked how Brazilians and Americans date. Made in Ceara had been running since 2013. Notas was the follow-up once the movies meant he could fill Sao Luiz without a kung fu plot. AdoroCinema's Netflix synopsis still sells two bits. How to seduce with Russian poetry. How to cure a broken heart in three days. Netflix Wiki adds Juliana Beirac as herself. The English title on the service is Edmilson Filho: Notas, Comedy about Relationships.,,
O Povo dated the Brazil drop around 5 March 2018. TMDB's release is 8 March 2018. US trackers later print 1 November 2018 as the date added. That is a catalog stagger, not a reshoot.,,
Halder used to own the gym.
VEJA told the origin. Filho, a taekwondo tricampeao from Fortaleza, trained at a gym Halder Gomes ran. Gomes cast him in the 2004 short that became Cine Holliudy. Distributors passed. They said the film was odd and spoken in "cearenses" and the rest of Brazil would not get it. Nine rooms in Ceara. A humble target of 20,000 tickets. Filho joked he would have been happy with 100. VEJA printed 380,000 sold. Wikipedia's film page later lists 481,203 spectators and 4.9 million reais. Either way the pair had a local movie star who could fill Sao Luiz.,
The relationship hour is the odd one in that filmography. No kung fu. No interior cinema. A Cearense movie star walking a packed hometown theatre through dating, then handing the tape to Netflix. Portal IN later quoted him on the partnership as a life one, teacher and student, Hong Kong movies to Cearense comedies. The special is the quiet sibling of that run.,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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