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Reviews
José e Pilar (2010)
Too good for Hollywood!
José & Pilar is a charming film that shows what the collaboration between Spain and Portugal is capable of producing. It's a shame joint efforts of this type are not more regularly forthcoming. Although it is Saramago who enjoys international renown, the film cannot be considered a hagiographic and exclusive tribute to the figure of the author. Saramago's Spanish better half, Pilar del Río occupies an equally important part. She is never overshadowed by her husband; an equal amount of that footage that does not feature the two together is very equally devoted to each individually. Thus we discover how irreplaceable Pilar had made herself in José's life as a companion, a translator, a personal secretary organizing his hectic agenda outside of those hours devoted to his literary production, a lifelong admirer and defender of his work. Any Portuguese or Spaniard who adheres to the ideals of Iberism ─ a romantic ambition to live in an Iberian Peninsula where the two countries would merge with Lisbon as its capital would find in this film the materialization of its theories. Spanish and Portuguese are the languages spoken in equal doses throughout the film, the director, Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, is Portuguese, Pedro Almodóvar is one of the various producers; the film takes us back and forth from Lanzarote in Spain where José and Pilar reside, to Lisbon or Azinhaga, Saramago's town of birth. All elements combine to create an atmosphere of total naturalness as far as being Spanish or Portuguese is concerned. Even the union between José and Pilar could be taken for a metaphor of that union between the two countries that republicans and left-wingers and romantics have worked toward. But apart from these minor observations, the core of the film is the life of the author as a creator, his ups and downs with the Portuguese government, which led to his self-exile in Lanzarote, his continuous and exhausting travels to the four corners of the earth to promote his books, attend book fairs, participate in congresses and sign copies bought by his readers and his refusal, considering his age, to simply sit down and take it easy. As he gets older the need to carry on working acquires the urgency of one who knows that death is on his tail. Above all the film is a testimony to the deep love José and Pilar profess for each other. It's not a love that manifests itself in words but rather tender gestures, mutual respect, clasping hands, the loving tone of voice used when addressing each other and at all times a love that transmits itself through the looks they proffer each other. It is truly moving the way the director has captured so much complicity and intimacy. A very surprising element in the film is Saramago's very peculiar sense of humour which Pilar often reacts to with no inferior sense of fun. The public watching this film at the Filmoteca in Madrid had a lot of laughs and as the film's credits started appearing indicating that the film had reached its end, there was a very generous round of applause for an enthralling documentary that kept us glued to our seats for close to two hours. José & Pilar was entered by Portugal in an unsuccessful bid to get it nominated in the Best Foreign Film category of the Oscars. This film is most likely not commercial enough for Hollywood. I would go even further and add that it's too good for Hollywood.
Sangue do Meu Sangue (2011)
A must see!
Joᾶo Canijo is indisputably one of the most interesting contemporary Portuguese movie directors. The four films seen to date, have left an indelible impression on me: Ganhar a Vida, Sapatos Pretos, Noite Escuro and recently Sangue do meu Sangue. His films send a punch to the viewers' guts leaving them breathless, knocked out; they abandon the moviehouse dazed by scenes that will haunt them for days to come.
Sangue do meu Sangue is set in the low working-class Bairro do Padre Cruz, a slum northeast of Lisbon, target to recent architectural projects and municipal efforts to efface its notoriously shady reputation. The film depicts a crosscut of three social classes: firstly the low working class Márcia and her family belong to; secondly the even less privileged Lisbon residents sharing with African immigrants a labyrinthine sub-world reminiscent of what Pedro Costa's trilogy on Fontainhas portrays. Finally the upper middle class represented by the Doctor and his wife living a Portuguese version of the "American dream": active professionals with a daughter who reside in an up-market dream home, two cars in the driveway and a servant at madam's beck and call.
Like Canijo's other films, Sangue to meu Sangue evolves around a central feminine character, Márcia, a single mother who has brought up and supported two children and a live-in sister. The women in Canijo's films are true heroines, resilient but nonetheless victims of their male chauvinistic environment; they inevitably fall prey to the violence perpetrated by men around them, be those pivotal male figures in their lives or simply placed in their paths by destiny. Indeed destiny plays an important role in the scripts Canijo writes. In Sangue do meu Sangue destiny has Cláudia falling in love with a married man linked in some way to her mother's past ─ I'll say no more, not wanting to include a spoiler. Destiny too has a devastating humiliation in store for Ivete, Márcia's sister, at the hands of a ruthless man she doesn't recognize at a karaoke; he remembers her from their schooldays when he had a crush on her. Likewise Márcia attempts to shake off her daughter's destiny, endeavouring at all costs to stop her daughter's love affair with a married man. Claúdia is gullible enough to believe an older married man will jeopardize the cushiness of his marital life, casting off wife and child in exchange for her. Márcia is above all most preoccupied with thwarting the oepidal twist in Canijo's script evoking Greek tragedy. In Greek tragedy no-one can escape what the gods have ordained for them. Canijo plays with the spectator, builds our hopes up that his characters trapped in their precariously balanced lives may just pull through, but just when Joca appears in a deus ex machina ploy to defend his aunt Ivete, we realize that his destiny was to end up behind bars as an adult for a crime graver than what had previously sent him to a reformatory as a minor.
Modern tragedy allows for pathos in ordinary men whose quotidian lives we identify with. The moving relationship between Ivete and her nephew Joca rings of incest. Márcia is busy salvaging her daughter's future whereas Ivete takes upon herself the mission of safeguarding her nephew whose life is jeopardized by an unpaid debt. An unforgettable scene is Ivete and Jaco making their way through the narrow, unsightly, claustrophobic streets of the slum to the house of the drug dealer to settle Joca's debt. We sense imminent danger and the foreboding uneasiness of walking into a maze with no exit, a throwback to the Minotaur of Greek mythology awaiting his victims about to enter his domain. This family's financial constraints oblige them to share a reduced space. Canijo plays and uses this limitation to his advantage; he places the characters in a trap. Márcia, the siblings Cláudia and Joca and her sister Ivete are forced to stretch their capacity for cohabitation to the limit. So reduced a space leaves no room for secrets, the characters learn to lower their voices to maintain a privacy of sorts ─ even when what would really suit them would be to seek relief in shouting out their woes at the top of their voices ─ secrecy is too rare a luxury in a house where mother and daughter share a a tiny bedroom and bed, four people share a tiny bathroom sometimes peeing with the door open, and watching TV means sitting cramped on the settee legs stretched out over the other occupant's lap. Conversation is interrupted by someone crossing the room to get something, by someone coming out of the bathroom, by the normal comings and goings that the house by its nature and especially size imposes on the life of its occupants. Canijo at times divides the screen into two keeping discrete but parallel conversations going simultaneously; not unlike when in an opera a quartet sings, each couple busy with their own theme. This requires the spectators'maximum attention opting for the conversation which contributes more to unfolding of the melodrama.
Above all Canijo's great sense of tempo never lets a scene drag (a common trait to Portuguese cinema). His has an uncanny ability to build crescendo. We become entranced despite the ominous certainty that the ending is bound to be harrowing.
Rita Blanco, Anabela Moreira and Teresa Tavares render magnificent performances. Due praise to Anabela Moreira for what must have been an awfully difficult shooting experience of total frontal and back nudity picked up by the camera with the crudity Canijo's hyper-realism requires. Nothing like it since Isabela Rosselini in Blue Velvet. Mesmerizing and moving is the dignity Moreira imbues her character with, an air of "you can do what you like with my body but you'll never have my soul". The love she professes for her nephew, blood of her blood, which is what the film's title means, elevates her above the sordidness her sacrifice plunges her into.
Die Liebesbriefe einer portugiesischen Nonne (1977)
A terrible disappointment!
What led me to watch this film was the deceptive link it affects to have with the mysterious and hitherto debated origin of a series of letters written by a Portuguese nun from Beja in the Alentejo region, Mariana Acoforado, to her French lover Marquis De Chamilly. The original letters have been lost but they circulated in translations into several languages and were even published anonymously in Paris in 1669. Mariana's letters became synonymous with ardent love and passion, qualities attributed to Portuguese women for a certain time in those European countries where the letters were being read, with morbid curiosity no doubt. But the title is the only thing Jess Franco, the film's director, manages to salvage from what is otherwise a fascinating and mysterious relationship between a military man of aristocratic origins and the daughter of a well-to-do Portuguese gentleman who was placed in a convent at the early age of 11; her father's intentions were to assure her safety during the turbulent years of the Portuguese Restoration Wars (1663-68). This sad story of seduction and abandonment has its fruit in a literary genre of the letter. Franco's film could not possibly have strayed any further from the original tale of love gone wrong. Had the film industry existed during the time of the Reformation, the film would have been an excellent pamphlet of anti-Catholic propaganda. The film is a German production which somehow corroborates my suspicions that it could well be aimed at perpetuating a number of clichés concerning convents. We don't have secret tunnels connecting convents to the priest's residences; according to one of the clichés, skeletons of babies had due to illicit intercourse between priests and nuns littered these tunnels hidden from the eyes of the God-fearing populace. However, Franco's film presents us with an evil priest/confessor at a convent who obliges through lies to have a 15-year old girl, Maria Rosalea, put into the custody of nuns who turn out to be lesbian devil-worshipers whose plans for the little girl are mating her to the very devil himself during a nocturnal ceremony at which the rest of the community of nuns, dressed or rather undressed in cutaway habits receive the devil with frantic baring of their breasts while obscenely rubbing themselves with their wooden crucifixes and smacking their lips in sexual anticipation, avid to take the poor victim's place should Satan so require of them. As this does not happen they turn to one another for sexual solace. The priest had already been seen masturbating while listening to Mariana's confession. Later he forces her to give him head. He doesn't actually dare deflower her as her virginity is destined as an offering for the prince of darkness. Just in case anyone is wondering, the Inquisition makes its inevitable appearance in a confusion of events. While winding its ludicrous way towards the end the film suddenly changes genre. What seems destined to become a tragic ending with our innocent Mariana burnt at the stake, undergoes an unexpected turnabout and our heroine is saved by none other than the prince; a fit ending to a fairy tale. Had I not decided from the outset of the film that I would write a few lines for IMDb, I would not have been able to watch it till the end. If not the worst movie I've ever seen, it certainly occupies a very high place in the list.