Srgio Bianchi's "Chronically Unfeasible" is a blunt and mordant fist in the ribs of Brazil's middle class. Close in spirit to Luis Buuel's attacks on the bourgeoisie's infatuated gazes at itself, the film has a big heart that's both in the right place and on its sleeve.

The complacency of recent films about Brazil, which treat the country as if it were fixated only on sexual concerns set to a samba beat, have a built-in condescension. There seems to be an implicit agreement that in today's world cinema, Brazil will be the new stand-in for the gamy French comedies of the 1970's that toyed with sexuality in a broad, innocuous fashion. Mr. Bianchi and Gustavo Steinberg, who wrote the movie with him, are determined to comment on such a marginalization of their homeland. "The future of the world is what Brazil is today," someone says in the film, which is out to shake up the conceptions about the country that audiences may have taken from movies.

"Unfeasible" revolves around the eye-opening experiences of characters who are as much archetypes as they are people. They regularly meet at a Sao Paulo restaurant owned by Luis (Cecil Thir), who likes to think of himself as a decent person and who is attracted to a waiter (Dan Stulbach) with pale, non-Latino good looks. There's Alfredo (Umberto Magnani), a curious writer; Amanda (Dira Paes), the restaurant's manager, who leads a different and more socially involved life outside the establishment; and the oblivious, prattling Maria Alice (Betty Goffman). Mr. Bianchi uses the sprawling film to comment on the sleepwalking from which these self-proclaimed good citizens have to be roused.

It's hard not to impressed by the ambitions of the director, who tackles the subject of race and class. Brazilian films seem to be able to focus on one or the other but not both (and lately, not much on either). "Chronically Unfeasible" jumps around the country, and the contrasts between the haves and the have-nots   —   particularly the orphaned children abandoned by the state   —   is appalling. Mr. Bianchi's anger is evident, but his flirtation with absurdity undermines the weight of his disgust, as in a variation on an early scene with homeless men digging through a restaurant's garbage bins for food. In cases like this, when he makes his points too stridently, the audience is thrown off, and the picture seems nave and inconsequential despite the director's reach.

Yet in some scenes his comic sense works well: a well-attended strike against a farm is botched when the workers realize they have arrived at the wrong place. The movie shifts from a talk show where experts speak on the subjects raised in the film to the restaurant, a microcosm of middle-class Brazilian society; it's full of middle-class exploiters who rationalize that they are the victims, suffering because the streets are clogged with beggars and detritus of different races.

Mr. Bianchi is a director with a social conscience and a ferocity against the well-fed status quo, and "Chronically Unfeasible" is a picture that makes you demand more from everyone, including its director. Many artists are not cognizant of the medium's power to disturb, and you want him to become more accomplished at it because he asks the right questions.

Directed by Srgio Bianchi; written (in Portuguese, with English subtitles) by Mr. Bianchi and Gustavo Steinberg; directors of photography, Marcelo Coutinho and Antonio Penido; edited by Paulo Sacramento; art directors, Pablo Vilar, Beatriz Bianco and Jean-Louis Leblanc; produced by Mr. Bianchi, Mr. Steinberg and Alvarina Souza. Running time: 101 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown with a six-minute short, Roberto Berliner's "You Are What You Were Born For" today at 3 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall as part of the 38th New York Film Festival.

WITH: Daniel Dantas (Carlos), Betty Gofman (Maria Alice), Umberto Magnani (Alfredo), Dira Paes (Amanda), Dan Stulbach (Adam) and Cecil Thir (Luis).