Larissa: The Other Side of Anitta (2025)

Larissa: The Other Side of Anitta (2025) does one of the worst things a documentary can do. It purports to be about the person whose name is on the title but it’s really about the filmmaker. It’s not even a gradual shift; director Pedro Cantelmo wastes little time shoehorning himself into the narrative and taking control of it.

The ideal documentarian is invisible, noiseless, and inconspicuous; a detached, impartial observer like Frederick Wiseman — who taught me, among other things, that documentaries do not need narration. In addition to narrating, Cantelmo talks too much about his favorite subject; namely, his long-standing crush on Anitta, with whom he goes way back. He’s the Duckie to her Molly Ringwald.

I had never heard of Anitta (real name Larissa de Macedo Machado) before. Apparently, she’s a massive international pop sensation. Do you think her legions of adoring fans (for whom this doc was presumably made) or, for that matter, casual viewers such as myself give a damn about a lovesick lapdog who’s too dumb to realize he’s being strung along? For some inscrutable reason, Cantelmo believes we do, and that’s this movie’s downfall.

I’m aware that film is a subjective medium regardless of genre, but the least a documentarian can do is create and maintain a semblance of factuality, even if it’s illusion-enhanced (something along the lines of Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth”). The moment Cantelmo and Anitta strip naked so they can frolic in the shower, that’s all she wrote for this doc. Any credibility it might have accrued up to that point goes flying out the window. The whole thing becomes gonzo in the pornographic sense of the term.

The incident reeks of having been scripted (in a trashy reality TV show kind of way rather than a docufiction/mockumentary approach) and calls into question the film’s overall authenticity (or lack thereof). If it had been a spontaneous occurrence, it would not have made it into the final cut; if Cantelmo truly cared about Anitta as much as he says he does (or as much as screenwriter Maria Ribeiro has him say he does), he would have deleted the footage or turned the camera off altogether. He would have kept it private and intimate.

Furthermore, Cantelmo getting lucky is not the story. The story is supposed to be about Larissa, the homegrown, down-home girl from the favela whom we often hear about but never actually meet. They’re advertising Larissa but selling — nay, pimping Anitta. Even when we’re allegedly in Larissa’s presence, it’s still always and exclusively Anitta, and not just Anitta the sex symbol but Anitta the sex object. She sheds her clothes but not her public persona. Anitta’s other side is her backside.