Grand Tour [2024]

 Diverse elements that constitute cinema – from its technical facets and grammar to its sociocultural roles and historicity – were evoked with joyous abandon in Grand Tour by the virtuoso Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes. Forming a fascinating companion piece to his sublime masterpiece Tabu – in its tapping into colonial-era tapestry where nostalgia is sharply counterpointed by irony; chronicling of an infectious travelogue self-consciously stripped of exoticism; and channelling the palette of classical-era movies while deconstructing that and even celebrating its artifice – this wistful, eccentric, gorgeously composed, feverishly mounted and wildly experimental gem was ingeniously constructed in the form of a diptych. In the first act we follow Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant stationed in Rangoon in 1918 who flees in a fit of existential panic on the prospect of marriage to his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arriving for that purpose; he travels to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and further – initially to escape, but eventually through delirious inertia of motion – only to keep finding cheerful telegrams from Molly informing him that she’s happily in pursuit. In the second act we switchover to the optimistic Molly and follow her indefatigable journey, undeterred by Edward’s abandonment. Gomes, in a playful and idiosyncratic formal choice, alternated the story of the globetrotting lovers – shot in 16-mm on soundstage and accompanied by voiceovers whose languages changed based on the countries they’re in – with essayistic present-day footage of those places, some of which he’d shot before Covid stuck and directed the rest remotely. Further, though set in the past, one often sees them juxtaposed with anachronistic components, and this dazzling collapsing of the past and the present reminded me of Petzold’s engrossing film Transit.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Road Movie/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Burmese/Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese/English

Country: Portugal

Living Bad (Viver Mal) [2023]

 In Living Bad – João Canijo’s riveting reverse shot to the magnificent Bad Living – the Portuguese filmmaker shifted his gaze from the women running the decadent, crumbling hotel in Ofir to the guests visiting it over the same weekend. While it had interesting departures – three episodes in place of a single thread, the tone more cutting, and the colour palettes tad brasher – it too centred on feral, mutually lacerating relationships with manipulative matriarchs. Further, like its companion piece, the same exchanges between the hotel’s proprietors and guests reappear here, albeit foregrounded on the latter POVs this time, while conversations from the other side continue bleeding in; and this formal ingenuity added playful layers to the abrasive tales. These, alongside the choice of often filming the charged interactions from outside glass panes and through reflections – the sumptuous visual compositions were orchestrated in both films by cinematographer Leonor Teles – reiterated the diptych’s decidedly voyeuristic overtones. Canijo adapted motifs for the vignettes, each featuring toxic three-way relationships, from three plays by August Strindberg. In ‘Playing with Fire’ – tad reminiscent of Östlund's wickedly funny Triangle of Sadness – a photographer (Nuno Lopes) is intensely jealous of his alluring, successful, narcissistic and possibly cheating wife, and their marriage is further strained by his mom’s incessant phone calls. In ‘The Pelican’, a self-serving woman (Leonor Silveira) is having a secret affair with the opportunistic husband of her anxiety-ridden daughter (Lia Carvalho). And in ‘Motherly Love’ – the best of the three – a possessive, elitist mother (Beatriz Batarda) is clinically undermining her fragile daughter’s (Leonor Vasconcelos) intimate relationship with another woman (Carolina Amaral), because she can’t accept losing the “apple of her eyes” to someone from a lower class.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama/Omnibus Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Bad Living (Mal Viver) [2023]

 João Canijo’s Bad Living – which formed an ingeniously imagined and magnificently shaped diptych with Living Bad, where the two counterpointed and bled into each other like reflections on a shattered mirror – is a work of such dazzling formal exactitude, simmering emotional ferocity and hypnotic visual compositions that it leaves one crushed and exhilarated in parallel. It, incidentally, eloquently recalled the supercharged undercurrents of Bergman and the unsettlingly visceral palettes of Martel, while retaining a distinctive perspective and texture. Set in a hotel in the coastal town of Ofir – its retro décor, forlorn atmosphere, and interplay of spaciousness and claustrophobia made it a brooding character, in the same way as the sublimely beguiling and instinctively unnerving Saint-Tropez villa in Deray’s mesmeric La Piscine was – the deceptively fluid narrative is structured akin to a fiendish voyeur gliding along the different spaces in order to snoop at what’s transpiring, and weaving those intensely private conversations into an impression of complex intergenerational fault-lines that’re coloured by unresolved past contexts, memories, blames, wounds and deep-set misunderstandings. Over the course of a weekend, we witness the devastatingly fateful unravelling of the dysfunctional relationship between four troubled women – the abrasive matriarch Sara (Rita Blanco) who owns the failing property, her irrevocably crumbling elder daughter Piedade (Anabela Moreira) and volatile younger daughter Raquel (Cleia Almeida) who manage operations, and Piedade’s ravishing, estranged, grief-stricken daughter Salomé (Madalena Almeida) – who’re craving for their respective mother’s love, but continuously scarring each other in the process. Rapturously shot in arrestingly framed long, static shots – with the vibrant colours beautifully juxtaposing the moody, lonely atmosphere – the astonishingly enacted film substantiated Tolstoy’s hypothesis that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

The Tsugua Diaries [2021]

  One generally associates something dramatic, visceral and even out of the ordinary – with the possible emergence of startling disclosures – with reverse narrative chronology in cinema… after all, there’s something flamboyant about it. Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’ The Tsugua Diaries (“tsugua” being literally “august” spelled in reverse) was the very antithesis of that idea, and therefore diametrically removed from films that’ve resorted to this formal device, e.g. Memento, The Sweet Hereafter, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Irreversible, Sinq Fois Deux, etc. It had its share of simmering drama and unforeseen revelations too, and yet was such a seemingly breezy, freewheeling, carefree, improvisational and loosely structured work – and filled with such a lazy elegance – that it almost defied the formal rigour of filmmaking in general and such a punctilious narrative choice in particular. The film began with a dazzling and immersive sequence where its three main characters – Crista (Crista Alfaiate), Carloto (Carloto Cotta), and João (João Nunes Monteiro) – are seen dancing and enjoying over music and blazing colourful lights in a room. It immediately informed the strained character dynamics and gradually established the premise that they’re stuck in a tranquil and isolated country-house during Covid-19 lockdown. Over the course of August – where the days runs backward as indicated through vibrant cards – we observe them transforming a shabby place into something lovely by cleaning the pool, building a beehouse, arranging plants, flirting and lazing around. Eventually, the artifice behind the enchanting holiday is revealed – the fact that this is essentially a film-within-film, and the three are actors – thus adding sly, self-reflexive metanarrative to this befuddling yet playful pandemic movie. The alternatively sun-soaked and flashy cinematography added to its mystifying charm.

Director: Maureen Fazendeiro & Miguel Gomes

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Visit, or Memories and Confessions [1982]

 Aesthetically beautiful, architecturally elegant, resplendent, sprawling and with lovely views, while also warm, cosy, inviting and filled with ghosts of past and present, Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira’s erstwhile Porto villa – where he’d lived for four decades but had to sell due to mounting debts – was something worth prowling about and soaking in. He’d made this at the age of 73 – perhaps contemplating mortality – and had instructed that it be publicly screened only after his death; but, as it turned out, he’d live till the grand old age of 106 – making a plethora of movies right till the end – and hence it remained hidden for 33 long years. The film, therefore, ironically served as a double farewell – one by the man reminiscing about the place he’d called home, and another by the world of cinema to this towering giant who passed away a month before its release. As this enigmatically titled work alludes to, it captures a mystical visit to this place, and explores the memories that it houses through candid personal, familial, cinematic, philosophical and political confessions. These facets, in turn, made it a beguiling, elegiac, lyrical and meditative tone poem, and cine-memoir which fluidly alternated between diary and essay film. It begins with two amorphous visitors – whose voices we hear offscreen but never see – strolling around the deserted, luxurious house while musing on it. Thereafter, while they keep interjecting in short intervals, we hear Oliveira speaking directly to the camera about his childhood, his wife Maria, his children, his father’s business, his infinite love for the medium, his arrest during the Salazar dictatorship, and a lot more, and which he interspersed with his collection of home movies.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Manoel de Oliveira

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

The Strange Case of Angelica [2010]

Celebrated Portuguese auteur and one of cinema’s greatest statesmen Manoel de Oliveira’s hypnotic, mystical, ruminative, strangely oddball and fable-like penultimate film, The Strange Case of Angelica, was conceived in 1946 and the initial script was written in 1952; and yet it was finally made nearly 6 decades later, by which time the filmmaker was astonishingly 102 years old. This imbued a quaint sense of anachronism into the film and its protagonist, and a poignant sense of mortality too. Upon the untimely and mysterious death of the young Catholic bride Angélica (Pilar López de Ayala), a desperate hunt for a professional photographer on that rainy night leads to the summoning of absent-minded dilettante Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa, the director’s grandson) to get the job done. If the strangely tranquil look of the ravishingly beautiful woman wasn’t enough, he finds her opening her eyes and even smiling to him when he looks at her through his camera’s viewfinder. Consequently, this lost and introverted guy, who stays alone in a boarding house and is fascinated by outmoded subjects like men tilling the land manually to the rhythm of deeply mournful tunes – much to the bewilderment of his caring landlady and the other boarders – finds himself increasingly infatuated with the dead lady’s photograph. The spare narrative’s magic realism took an even more entrancing turn when the phosphorescent ghost of the lady appears – either in his dreams or in reality – and takes him on a transcendental ride through the night sky, which intensifies his obsessive quest. Curious mishmash of the old-fashioned and the modern, along with elements from silent era cinema, delicately suffused the film with an atmosphere that was fantastical, nostalgic and melancholic.

Director: Manoel de Oliveira
Genre: Drama/Magic Realism
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal

Mysteries of Lisbon [2010]

Raúl Ruiz’s magisterial and monumental 4 ½ hour symphony – the prolific Chilean filmmaker’s penultimate feature film, initially made as a 6-hour miniseries – is a work of seductive beauty, stunning bravado and staggering brilliance. Memory, parental abandonment, infidelity, unrequited love, passionate but destructive relationships, aristocratic entitlements, and faith were the key themes in this luxuriously mounted period piece akin to a Dickensian saga or a Balzacian “human comedy”, while its narrative intricacies – achieved through elaborate, interconnected flashbacks – were quite breathtaking. Yet, for all its irresistible storytelling, Ruiz’s artistic and formalist vision, be it structurally and tonally or in its shifting POVs and sensorial compositions, were also discernible, making this a work of grand artistry. The episodic, labyrinthine plot was strung together by the intertwined lives of three men – João (João Arrais / Afonso Pimentel), the illegitimate son of an obsessed aristocrat’s wife (Maria João Bastos), who later, as a young poet haunted by the memories of his mother, falls hopelessly in love with the ravishing older lady Elisa (Clotilde Hesme); Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), an enigmatic but compassionate priest who was an illegitimate child to a doomed affair, fell in love as a young man with Elisa’s enchanting mother (Léa Seydoux), and later became a caretaker for João’s life and fate; and Alberto de Magalhães (Ricardo Pereira), a roguish, enigmatic nouveau riche man with a disreputable past whose life, too, has been inextricably linked to Pedro and Dinas, and to Elisa too. The magnificent cinematography – a rapturous synthesis of delicate hues, compositions and framing of impressionistic paintings, brought to motion with glorious tracking shots and signature deep focus shots –, and hauntingly melodic soundtrack, made this masterwork a mesmeric audiovisual spectacle.

p.s. My 1400th movie review at Cinemascope.

Director: Raul Ruiz
Genre: Drama/Period Drama/Romantic Drama/Religious Drama/Family Drama/Epic
Language: Portuguese/French
Country: Portugal

Arabian Nights [2015]

Miguel Gomes’ eccentric and ambitious magnum opus Arabian Nights – spread over 6 hours and split into three volumes (The Restless One, The Desolate One, The Enchanted One) is a work of contradictory brilliance, borne out of anger, dispair and bitterness, and packed with absurdity, melancholy, magic realism and acrid humour; or, as another reviewer marvelously put it, it’s “the blind men’s elephant: miniseries and short story cycle, documentary and fantasy, proletarian and prohibitive.” It begins with reportage of two parallel events – the heartwrenching closure of an enormous shipyard, and a wasp plague. With these, along with the simmering rage at how a government bereft of social justice held a beleaguered Portugal hostage to economic austerity – which led to slashing of jobs, wages and pensions – begins a series of curiously fascinating tableaux curated by a team of journalists Gomes had tasked with finding stories from across the country from that devastating period, using One Thousand and One Nights as a framing device. The best of the nine episodes, along with the vérité style opening chapter, comprised of – the nasty account of a group of bankers willing to ease up on austerity in exchange for cure to their impotence; the powerfully bleak tale of individuals left unemployed by the crisis, invited for a rare moment of fun; a satirical public trial which starts with a trifle offence, becomes increasingly elaborate and crazy, until no one’s innocent; a deeply affecting tale of a dog in a huge apartment block whose owners keep changing; an intimate monologue of a Chinese immigrant girl set against videos of massive public protest; and, a dream-like, quietly enthralling and nearly dialogue-free montage on a disappearing group of birdtrappers.

Director: Miguel Gomes
Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Fantasy
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal

Tabu [2012]

Miguel Gomes’ offbeat, poetic and ravishingly beautiful Tabu is a delightfully lavish exercise in melodrama – a genre rarely associated with arthouse rigour and minimalism. And, it’s also a meditation on old age, an infectious love story, an ingenious exercise in formal audacity and, crucially, a striking commentary on the dark heart of colonialism – including, the shallow romanticization of it in cinema. And these, in turn, made this delightfully old-fashioned and yet impishly modernist. The movie started with a dreamlike non-sequitar sequence of a Portuguese explorer in Africa surrounded by the suffering continent’s slave natives and haunted by his dead wife. At this point the main narrative kicked off, structured into two dramatically different halves (stylistically, spatially and temporarily). Part 1 (“Paradise Lost”) was centered on three Lisbon-based women –soft-spoken Human Rights activist Pilar (Teresa Madruga), her neurotic and aged neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral) and the latter’s African immigrant housemaid (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso) who regularly faces racist insinuations from her senile employer; Part 2 (“Paradise”), told in a long flashback, and set somewhere in Lusophone Aftica just before the Portuguese Colonial War began, chronicled the scorching, illicit affair between a younger Pilar (Ana Moreira), married to a wealthy colonial settler, and a rakish young musician (Carloto Cotta) fleeing from his debobair past. The restrained chamber drama of the first half made for a fascinating contrast to the gloriously sweeping and swashbuckling second which, interestingly, almost played out like an old film with a voice-over narration replacing onscreen dialogues. The elegiac piano score that the film began and is interspersed with, peppy pop songs and rich, grainy B/W photography marvelously complemented its quirky, impressionistic and emotionally enthralling tone and texture.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Adventure
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal