It’s impossible to discuss Love Strange Love without acknowledging its central, challenging element: the sexualization of a 12-year-old boy by adult women. While the film is not graphic by today’s standards (it relies more on suggestion and psychological implication), its premise remains deeply provocative. Khouri deliberately blurs the line between “awakening” and “abuse,” refusing to offer easy moral judgments. This has led to the film being both banned and championed over the decades—some call it a masterpiece of taboo psychology; others, a troubling artifact of its era.
Here’s a short write-up on the 1982 film Love Strange Love (original Portuguese title: Amor Estranho Amor ), directed by Walter Hugo Khouri. In the landscape of erotic cinema, few films are as simultaneously lush and unsettling as Walter Hugo Khouri’s Love Strange Love . Often remembered—and sensationalized—for launching a young Vera Fischer (later Miss Brazil) to stardom, the film is far more than its notoriety suggests. It is a deeply psychological, almost hypnotic exploration of memory, power, and the murky boundary between affection and exploitation. love strange love movie
Not for all tastes, but for those who appreciate challenging, atmospheric cinema, Love Strange Love is a haunting gem. Watch it not for scandal, but for its haunting meditation on how our earliest encounters with desire shape—and scar—us for life. It’s impossible to discuss Love Strange Love without
Ultimately, Love Strange Love is less a film about sex than about loneliness. It’s a rainy, melancholy daydream of lost innocence, where the most dangerous desire isn’t the one between bodies, but the desperate need to be loved—even in the strangest of forms. This has led to the film being both
On the surface, Love Strange Love is a coming-of-age story drenched in erotic atmosphere. But Khouri, a master of existential angst, layers the narrative with uncomfortable questions. The “strange love” of the title is not merely the boy’s awakening but the twisted maternal longing, jealousy, and loneliness of the women who use him as a mirror for their own shattered dreams.
The film treats sexuality not as liberation but as a currency of power and a source of existential dread. The opulent brothel, cut off from the outside world by relentless rain, becomes a microcosm of society’s hypocrisies: where the rich men come to indulge their vices, but it is the women and a child who pay the emotional price.