''The 5th Monkey'' is a Brazilian-American 1990

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super ...

directed and written by Éric Rochat and starring

Ben Kingsley Sir Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji; 31 December 1943) is an English actor. He has received various accolades throughout his career spanning five decades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Grammy Award, and tw ...

. The film was based on the novel ''Le Cinquieme Singe'' by Jacques Zibi.

The Cannon Group The Cannon Group, Inc. was an American group of companies, including Cannon Films, which produced films from 1967 to 1994. The extensive group also owned, amongst others, a large international cinema chain and a video film company that invested ...

founder Menahem Golan produced via his 21st Century Film Corporation, following the demise of Cannon. The original music score was composed by Robert O. Ragland.

Plot

Cunda (Kingsley) lives deep in the Brazilian rainforest and is intent on making enough money so he can marry a widow in his village. However, his trade - capturing snakes for scientists - pays very little money, and he is in direct competition with other suitors. One day, Cunda is bitten by a

snake Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes . Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more j ...

, and he crawls to the river to recover. While going through the agonizing recovery, he has an hallucination of four chimpanzees sitting in the river. Recovered, he returns home and finds the four chimpanzees waiting for him, and his efforts to shoo them away fail. Knowing that chimpanzees are not native to

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

, he decides that they are a kind of supernatural gift for him. Believing this, he decides to take them to "the city" to sell them. The journey isn't easy from the start; he discovers that he can't tie them on a rope and drag them, and the only way is to coax them. They stumble into a gold-panning camp, where Cunda is forced to work in order to pay off an old debt. When one of the monkeys is taken as payment, Cunda must figure how to retrieve the monkey and escape. Later, he, the monkeys and the adults of a village are kidnapped by mercenaries. Cunda and the monkeys escape, along with a village woman who refuses to leave his side. Arriving at a small town, a confusing sequence results in one of the monkeys disappearing, and Cunda becoming the servant of the local rich woman who has taken it upon herself to take care of the monkeys. Cunda now has to solve these two problems, and deal with the fact of the

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...

woman's attraction to him plus his growing fondness of the monkeys.

Cast

as Cunda *Silvia De Carvalho as Maria *Mika Lins as Octavia * Vera Fischer as Mrs. Watts

External links

* * * English-language Brazilian films 1990 films 1990 romantic drama films American romantic drama films Brazilian romantic drama films Films about animal rights Films about apes Films about poverty Films based on French novels Films based on romance novels Films about hunters Films scored by Robert O. Ragland Films set in Brazil Films set in forests Columbia Pictures films Films produced by Menahem Golan 1990s English-language films 1990s American films {{1990s-US-film-stub