Plot Summary
The film opens through the telescope lens of one of the city’s many colorful outcasts, as he watches a truck arriving carrying mattresses. We meet La Garza, the proprietor of The Smoking Fish nightclub and brothel and her current lover Dimas. Dimas, exuberant and yet full of suppressed dissatisfaction, is at his peak. We see him jubilant at the arrival of the fresh beds for the prostitutes and proud as he watches children celebrating round the burning pyres of old mattresses. But the ritual is tense and uneasy, foreshadowing the community’s easy embrace of substitutes.

Three men, in sequence, compete for La Garza’s favors and, thereby, control of The Smoking Fish: Tobias, Dimas and Jairo. Tobias, now weak and paranoid rots in jail following machinations by Dimas that took place previous to the film’s opening. As the film settles in Jairo, a young and naive drifter, sets his own sights on the The Smoking Fish and befriends Dimas. He arrives at the brothel without a dime and begs for a job. La Garza and her man of the moment give him a chance, and once inside the business, he win their confidence.

Jairo soon learns how to play the game and begins to undermine Dimas and take control for himself. Dimas is ousted and arrested, but he breaks out of jail and returns to assassinate Jairo, only to accidentally kill La Garza instead. Dimas finds himself next to Tobias, the man he once played the same dirty trick on while Jairo assumes absolute control of the brothel, establishing his favorite prostitute, Selva Maria, as the new madam.

The Smoking Fish.avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	2h 2mn
Size:	1.54 GiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	640x480
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	29.970 fps
Bit rate:	1 532 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/CDF67C6B0405D8F/The_Smoking_Fish.avi

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English hardsubs

The post Román Chalbaud – El pez que fuma AKA The Smoking Fish (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.