by ·Comments Off on Trails / Barefoot (João César Monteiro)

Trails aka Paths (1978)

Some kind of montage of folk tales, fables, poetry, with some gratuitous nudity.

White-haired guy is a relentless storyteller. A good section where a guy is running side-quests for a sheep thief, followed by too many scenes where admittedly cool-looking people stand still and recite lines. One guy gets imprisoned by gunmen for setting their slave-labor free. I got very tired and spaced out, but we reached present day somehow. The main(?) characters are a young couple in love, of course, or maybe multiple couples, since at one point she’s stabbed and thrown into the sea, and later she and her baby get killed by werewolves. Whatever’s going on here, Monteiro sure knows how to frame a shot.

–
He Goes Long Barefoot That Waits For Dead Men’s Shoes (1965)

Early short containing some of his later preoccupations (doomed couples, mirrors, Luis Miguel Cintra).

by ·Comments Off on À Flor do Mar (1986, João César Monteiro)

“Life is made of mistakes.” A family has a big few days harboring a fugitive. I think people are calling it Ruizian because of the pirates, but it’s truly very euro-arthouse, and I dig it. Rivettian in a few ways: long takes, long movie, creaky furniture and a cat following its own direction. I knew nothing about Monteiro a couple months ago, and now I’ve seen Silvestre and all his movies have been newly-restored on blu-ray, and why not watch them all?

Laura (the prolific Laura Morante of The Son’s Room and Coeurs) had moved her kids to Italy after her husband died suddenly last summer, is back on the Portuguese coast to visit her sisters-in-law (older Oliveira regular Manuela de Freitas, younger Teresa Villaverde, better known as a director) when an American washes up on the beach, so she takes him home to hide out. He successfully lays low during searches from police and pirates, then leaves them alone. “We’ll have to learn how to use up the remaining unhappiness.”

I don’t know whether the guy was named after Conan the Barbarian writer Robert Jordan on purpose, or if Laura’s last name being Rossellini is meaningful, but Sara recites from Doomed Love (she appeared in the film eight years earlier), and their cat is named Silvestre.

The lead actors staring at Monteiro:

by ·Comments Off on Silvestre (1982, Joao Cesar Monteiro)

Supremely cool movie, the artificial look gave me flashbacks to Perceval Le Gallois. I guess I like Monteiro now, and there’s plenty more to see.

Without Affinity I don’t know how to remove weird watermarks:

Maria de Medeiros looked exactly the same age 22 years later in The Saddest Music in the World, doesn’t transform from a damsel into the warrior Silvestre until the last 40 minutes. Her sister was in Francisca the same year, went on to star in Tabu. Luis Miguel Cintra is the villain here, and Paio also played second fiddle to Cintra in Ilha dos Amores and Satin Slipper.

by ·Comments Off on Abraham’s Valley (1993, Manoel de Oliveira)

Not the most compelling story, but the film itself is so lovely. It’s been a minute since I watched an Oliveira but this has got to be among his greatest color cinematography, shot by Mário Barroso who’d soon move on to Monteiro films when Oliveira started working more in French and English. Came out between Non and Inquietude – there are seven other 1990s features I need to catch up with. The actors wait patiently while the narrator speaks their thoughts or backstory, or talks about them telling stories or doing actions we don’t see them doing, then they carry on with their scripted business.

Doctor Luís Miguel Cintra is set up with the beautiful young Ema, who is really too young until her aunt dies and she turns into wide-eyed Leonor Silveira. Time accelerates, and soon enough she’s sleeping with violinist Narcisco who is her daughters’ age. Nobody figures out how to have a successful relationship or marriage, eventually all of them die.

Leonor/Ema with Luís Lima Barreto and young Diogo Dória:

Moments before Luís tosses this cat straight into the camera:

Per Rosenbaum:

“This is a lyrical film,” Oliveira has aptly written. “It is so in the way a woman resists men, who represent power, on the strength of her poetic outlook on the world, even if it is mere illusion… This is the theme of Abraham’s Valley: how poetry will lead Ema to her own agony, how she will construct her death on the basis of a poetic view of the world and finally, how she will, step by step, organize such agony poetically.”

Young Ema:

I thought I was a bad viewer getting time periods mixed-up, but Michael Sicinski:

Part of what makes Oliveira’s cinema so constantly disarming has to do with this auteur’s disarming use of time, a factor that became much more pronounced in his later years. Take Abraham’s Valley, a film more than three hours in length. The characters in the film, particularly married couple Ema and Carlo and their servants, scan as aristocratic holdovers from another age, the same type of subjects who so often populate Oliveira’s cinema. Looking at their dress and behavior, one would place them in the mid-19th century. But only after 90+ minutes of screen time is it affirmed that Abraham’s Valley takes place in the present day (1993).

Unhappy Family:

by ·Comments Off on To Die Like a Man (2009, João Pedro Rodrigues)

Tonia wants an operation to become a real woman. Meanwhile her life is falling apart and everyone is being extremely mean to her. Her army son shoots a coworker and runs, her junkie thief boyfriend kills the fish and sets the dog on fire, her employer says she’s gotten too old for her job. The boyfriend sobers up and settles back into his dressmaking work for the drag shows, and in a bit of good luck, they get lost and stumble across the couple who buried the son’s victim as “the unknown soldier,” so the body was never found by the authorities. In less-good luck, Tonia’s leaking breast implants have to be removed, and now she’s de-transitioning and dying.

by ·Comments Off on Will-o’-the-Wisp (2022, João Pedro Rodrigues)

Prince Alfredo’s dying flashback to 2011 flits from a forest musical to a dinner scene where Al (now curly-haired Mauro Costa) gives a dinner-table speech to camera about how older generations are failing us. He decides to become a fireman, is shown around by Affonso (André Cabral). The firemen train to The Magic Flute, and entertain themselves with nude reenactments of famous artworks. While Al is looking at a penis slideshow he gets a call saying his dad has died of covid and he must return to the royal family, but he’ll always remember his time with Affonso, who I guess becomes president of Portugal. A much sillier movie than The Ornithologist.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

Will-o’the-Wisp is a critical inquiry into Portuguese history staged as intellectual gay porno, a Hottest Hunks of the Fire Brigade charity calendar that lights upon the legacy of colonialism, Western visual culture, and the ornamental irrelevance of Portugal’s faded aristocracy.

Charles Bramesco in Little White Lies:

Sex should be fun and just a tiny bit goofy, an intuitively understood real-life concept that nonetheless eludes filmmakers all over the globe.

funeral fashions of the future:

by ·Comments Off on The Tsugua Diaries (2021, Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro)

Miguel’s covid-era meta-movie, the days edited in reverse order, the title a reversal of an earlier feature. The movie starts as a light threesome drama, then begins to be about the complications around its own making. For all its formal games, it has a time-killing feeling of “no other movies being made during lockdown, so we made one” – there’s time-lapse and slow-mo and Gomes all but admitting he doesn’t know what happens in the film.

Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope:

Within the context of a playfully narrative feature, The Tsugua Diaries comes close to capturing what moviemaking actually feels like—at least moviemaking as practiced in the free-and-easy manner of Fazendeiro and Gomes. When the actors convey to the filmmakers their worries that the scenes aren’t working, Gomes’ response highlights a fact of life that auteurist critics in particular ignore at their peril: he informs the cast that he, Fazendeiro, and Ricardo are “finding that, overall, it’s been a good performance.” Gomes here demonstrates that he knows that actors drive the action, not directors—a notion that he takes all the way on Day 7, when he must accompany Fazendeiro to a prenatal exam, and tells his actors to direct themselves. How, they ask? “Work it out,” says Gomes—which could be the slogan for every film set.

Most importantly, there are two parrots, and baby peacocks:

by ·Comments Off on Francisca (1981, Manoel de Oliveira)

The last in Oliveira’s Tetralogy of Frustrated Love is the third I’ve seen (Benilde, you’re next). Either this is the most eccentric of the bunch, or I’ve just forgotten how eccentric Past and Present and Doomed Love were. Each scene is a single-take diorama, and whole dialogue exchanges are repeated from different camera setups. Memorably in a late scene, the camera is between the characters, so each one speaks directly to us. Rigidly composed, more subtly dreamlike than Ruiz. Very writerly dialogue, “We live torn to pieces, in search of our bodies scattered all over the earth.” Also my second movie of the weekend with operatic singing, Balzac mentions and an unbalanced, punitive love triangle.

Camilo (Castelo Branco, the Doomed Love writer!) and Jose Agusto are both after “Fanny” Francisca. She is Teresa Menezes of the Non, Camilo is Mário Barroso with the thickest mustache (better known as a cinematographer, he’d shoot four of Oliveira’s 90’s films) and Jose Agusto is Diogo Dória with a droopy mustache (his first for MdO, he’d become a regular). Jose is with Fanny’s sister Maria, but he steals Fanny from his “friend,” eloping with her in the night (she falls off her horse immediately), then spends no time with her, leaving her alone in their new house. When Fanny dies, Jose thinks he’s to blame, becomes morose and obsessive, orders an autopsy and keeps her heart in a jar. Jose dies under suspicious circumstances soon after. Camilo was in his late twenties at this point – it’s set during the year he wrote Mysteries of Lisbon.

Doomed Lovers:

Dave Kehr:

In 19th-century Portugal, a rising young novelist falls in love with the daughter of an English army officer, provoking the obscure envy of an aristocratic friend, who resolves to marry the girl himself and make her suffer for her betrayal. The baroque plot is presented in a series of single-take tableaux, which do not attempt to embody the drama as much as allude to it, leaving the dense and passionate feelings to take shape entirely in the spectator’s mind. Oliveira limits himself to showing only what can truly be shown: not the story but a representation of the story, not the emotions but their material manifestations as they have crossed the decades.

Carson Lund in Slant:

Filming in immaculately dressed and lit rooms and separating his single-take sequences with matter-of-fact title cards that address, often with subtle wit, the actions about to take place, de Oliveira presents Francisca’s narrative progression as something of a foregone conclusion. The experience of watching the film feels akin to surveying a series of museum paintings and periodically pausing to digest the museum label beneath them; at times, de Oliveira will even play a scene twice, back-to-back, from two different angles, reinforcing the stuck-in-time nature of the storytelling. In the place of narrative transformation and suspense is a deadpan air of judgment that recalls the amused omniscience of Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of Enlightenment-era narcissism, Barry Lyndon, which charts another roguish gentleman trying to rise above his station via a marital engagement.

Glenn Heath Jr. called it “one of the greatest films about wasted time.”

by ·Comments Off on Vitalina Varela (2019, Pedro Costa)

Costa loves his very low-light digital cinematography (very cool, Lois Patiño-esque) with actors being extremely still, until he faces a challenge in the second half with a jittery Ventura – either the actor or his priest character is now afflicted with Parkinson’s. Everyone in this movie is desperate, all zombie-walking through spaces, only VV has any passion left. Her confrontation with Ventura is intense, and her big backstory monologue takes place on the toilet.