As the movie starts off ludicrously, with a fully grown black ‘baby’, telling Macunaima, who is introduced as the hero of the country, then later morphs into a white man. In anti-heroic narrative, he becomes a trickster and embarks on a picaresque odyssey, confronting a giant cannibal as he roves through from the jungle into Brazilian modernism.

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  While the movie itself is full of risqué jokes and floridly metaphorical allusions to racism, Brazil's traumatic colonial history, the military dictatorship and other taboo topics, Macunaima himself is an allegory to the question of national identity which is more or less problematic in the light of Brazil’s colonial past, in particular under economic dependence. In the last urban sequence at the Felliniesque wedding feasts that takes place in an expansive indoor pool teeming with many guests, Macunaima who wears a yellow and green tuxedo and blue socks that resemble the colours of a Brazilian flag, is forced to sway back and forth on a gigantic swing above the blood-spattered pool. He successfully tricks the cannibal into the swing. Following a high-angle long shot, Macunaima reaches for a bow and arrow and wounds the cannibal in his revenge. 

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  Macunaima has passed into folklore into a national hero who beats “the System”, but this heroic sequence somewhat shares similar vein with the closing sequence of the film, but in a savagely satirical way. The diegesis of Macunaima’s death scene where he is devoured by the elusive Uiara in the lake and the red blood stain extends across the entire screen referentially hooks the audience back to not merely the death scene of the cannibal but also the opening scene – the birth of Macunaima is narrated in voice-over against a red backdrop. Macunaima is born a hero and should be glorified; however, in Brazil, outsmarting the bureaucracy or proving one’s resourcefulness against intractable officials is a national pastime. Joaquim Pedro’s final twist of the legend, Macunaíma’s unhappy end, reveals just how miniscule these victories are. The use of colours, pivoting from the mud (yellow), water (blue) into Macunaima’s green jacket again reminds us of the Brazilian flag. Plainly stated in the last shot: Macunaima is the story of a Brazilian devoured by Brazil. Victims and executioners are one and the same: devouring themselves. The so-called heroes of collective consciousness, are striving to devour those who devour the weakest. Yet being insufficiently potent, they are bound to be transformed into products, devoured by an apparently prosperous economy where consumption brings about destructions.