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