O Princípio da Incerteza (2002) Poster

(2002)

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10/10
Mature masterpiece
shine-27 November 2002
Another masterpiece from the portugese master. Very different from last years popular Je rentre a la maison. This work is more akin to films like Abraham valley and Francisca. An american audience would obviously not get anything from a film as refined as this one.

Camila (Leonor Baldaque) marries António but is the marriage based on love? What is the role of Vanessa? Camila is passive-aggressive and puzzles her environment and the audience.

The cinematography by Renato Berta is superb. There are no camera movements except when the camera is on a bus or a train.

It's hard to summarise a great work like this. Just another peculiar note. Camila is played by the writers granddaughter. The man who really loves her is played by the directors grandson. Both roles captures something of their makers, according to the director.

Anyone interested in serious cinema should see this. People who prefer braindead american cinema shoud stay away.
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9/10
Quantum cinema
daniel_cms11 December 2008
O Principio da Incerteza is a film that, probably, most people will not understand, nor appreciate. It is no more and no less then art, and, thus, it is no more, and no less, then life. To achieve a proper explanation of what this film is, or of what it is about, it would be necessary to understand the nature of cinema itself as form of art.

The plot is quite interesting, as it is also the idea contained by the film. In fact, in the beginning of the story we are given what seem to be very marked and strongly defined characters. For instance it is immediately noticeable the attempt to associate some characters with their contrasting personas – represented in the opposition between the two women, between the two men and between the housekeeper and the Mother of the family.

As the film progresses the behaviour of the characters seems to evolve, and at least apparently, in a contradictory manner. So, not only the "manichean" view of the characters that we are presented with in the beginning of the film is discarded later on, but also the personalities of the characters appears to suffer from some form of mutation that leads them closer to what was their opposite. With one exception though: Camile, the main character, and the only true archetype. Only one catch: such archetype is constructed from within that persona, which, naturally, not only makes it impossible for the other characters in the film to understand her, but it also implies that solely by intuition, and not by a classical logic construction, we can catch a glimpse of her nature.

"O Principio da Incerteza", or "the uncertainty principle" is actually a cinematic representation of Werner Heisenberg's quantum physic's principle: The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known.
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1/10
Don't Waste Your Time
lewieb3 October 2002
Saw it at the New York Film Festival and could tell I was in for trouble when they didn't have some guy dressed in black tell us how great the film would be before it started. That's because they (the people that run the NY FF) must've known this movie was horrible.

Ostensibly about the nature of love, class distinctions and other high-brow stuff, the movie was a series of banal discussions that led nowhere. The acting was uninspired. The endless shots of the Portuguese countryside, while beautiful, were, well, endless.

People started walking out on this movie about 45 mins. in. I should've joined them.
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5/10
THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE (Manoel De Oliveira, 2002) **
Bunuel19763 December 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Along with the even more disappointing PARTY (1996), this is the least Oliveira I've watched so far. The film is an interminable two-and-a-quarter hours talk-fest of a family saga in modern-day Portugal; while featuring a couple of fine performances by its lovely leading ladies (Leonors Baldaque and the ubiquitous Leonor Silveira), the narrative is never as gripping (or even engaging) as its makers seem to think. Incidentally, it has a deliberately stilted (read: archaic) feel to it redolent of the final works of various master film-makers – such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's GERTRUD (1964), Robert Bresson's L'ARGENT (1983) and even Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999); the irony is that Oliveira, 94 at the time of filming this, is still at it six years later and, on the contrary to THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE, those above-mentioned films had all been remarkable movies!

Anyhow, the narrative involves Baldaque, member of an impoverished family, being married off to a crippled boy of aristocratic lineage; their relationship is troubled, however, due to her being pursued by the husband's best friend but, even more so, by the boy's own affair with his friend's female associate (Silveira) – owner of a chain of brothels! The girls are effectively played up as opposites – with Baldaque the saint and Silveira (clearly) the sinner; for obvious reasons, they don't get along…though, at one point, there's a surprising suggestion of Silveira being a lesbian given her (ufortunately for the viewer but not unexpected in this company) unfulfilled longing for her rival! Similarly, the final scene sees Baldaque bafflingly rejecting a lawyer/admirer's claims of her being a good girl!

By far, the film's most incongruous moments are those set inside Silveira's discotheque – especially the one in which a group of masked revelers casually spill alcohol on the floor as they dance and then set fire to the place (as it happens, a deliberate attempt by the owners to claim insurance money in order to pay off a debt to their ruthless financiers!) and during which Baldaque's drunken husband perishes. Besides, the film is intermittently accompanied by a strident violin-led score which grows more annoying with the passage of time – not to mention pointless and, alternately, static and moving transition shots of the landscape which add little except length to the film.
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