Tag: Portuguese

Sunburn (Golpe de Sol)

Posted on by victorfraga

F Francisco (Nuno Pardal), Simão (Ricardo Barbosa), Vasco (Ricardo Pereira) and Joana (Oceana Basilio) are virtually cut off from the rest of the world in a large and extravagant villa somewhere in Portugal. It’s a sweltering summer, and they spend most of of their time in the swimming pool, strutting around in skimpy bathing suits, rehearsing selfies in front of the mirror or dancing to Brazilian songs. It sounds like most people’s idea of paradise. But it’s not.

Behind the apparent idyllic setting there’s a lot of tension. Sexual tension, emotional tension. Not all is pretty and clean. This is a place for “gin, sun, pool and flies”, says one of the friends, thereby highlighting the duality of the sumptuous summer abode. The distant sound of sirens and helicopters is pervasive throughout the film. Such luxury and isolation are strangely suffocating, and never liberating.

Most crucially, a mythical man called David is about to arrive any day. All four friends have been romantically connected and remain infatuated with the elusive male. They all long and fear his arrival in equal measures. They gradually break down in their anxiety. They are indeed fond of each other, but they are also competing amongst themselves. There’s only one David, and only one of them can have him. A lot like in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), except that the irresistible man is nowhere to be seen. In fact, the entire film narrative is constructed upon David’s impending arrival. You will be forced to stick around until the end of 82-minute feature in order to see his face and experience his power – or not.

Most of the dialogues in the film are about their past connections with David, all in both sordid and picante detail. There is a lot of voice-over conveying the most profound emotions that they are unable to vocalise to each other. Otherwise the four friends are mostly laconic, floating on a giant flamingo buoy (pictured below). All in old-fashioned nostalgic and melancholic Portuguese fashion. They make bleak and witty remarks: “Life is ugly, that’s why people have children” or “When you have a child give him Bergman at six and Tarkovsky at eight, and illusions are over”.

Ultimately, Sunburn is a mockery of failed modern love, and people tragically trapped in conservative dreams of marriage. It’s effective and riveting enough to keep you hooked until the end. The performances are convincing, too. The script, however, insistently delves into petit bourgeois afflictions, and some people might find it a little pedantic. I still enjoyed it, though.

The entire movie soundtrack is delivered by Johnny Hooker, a fast rising and very talented Brazilian LGBT musician. The lyrics (which are translated throughout the movie) are very pertinent: “I’m going to do some black magic in order to tie you to me”, or the very subtle: “do you still think of me when you fuck him?”

Sunburn showed at BFI Flare, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on BFI Player on Monday, April 22nd.

Diamantino

Posted on by victorfraga

Diamantino (Carloto Cotta) is the greatest football player in the world. He’s an artist on the pitch. When he gets the ball, time slows down, and giant puppies appear. He’s also one of the most brainless characters since Mr Bean. Diamantino, a broad, brilliant Portuguese comedy from Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, presents an awakening by a figure who has not once needed to think about events beyond the pitch, when his easy life comes into contact with refugees, drone surveillance, populism and nationalism.

If that sounds potentially didactic, fear not, because Diamantino is more of a snapshot of contemporary ideas and concerns, in the mould of an Austin Powers or Happy Madison gross out comedy. That’s the immense strength of this film: cycling through genres and styles as Abrantes and Schmidt see fit. From one minute to the next, it can veer from spy territory into sci-fi, political satire, tender romance, or something else. For one montage of Diamantino’s growing relationship with his adopted son the film suddenly adopts Terrence Malick-like cinematography and a track from The Tree of Life (2011) soundtrack plays.

It’s that free-form, Richard Lester energy that lets Diamantino get away with a nonsense plot set in a world slightly adjacent to our own. Diamantino, played with vacant joy by Cotta, is a clear Cristiano Ronaldo surrogate, though it’s not sure how far the parallel goes. Ronaldo is currently under investigation on rape allegations for a 2009 incident. The virginal Diamantino is no monster. He’s a such an empty vessel as to just let everyone in his life walk over him and mold him into whatever image they need, form his manipulative twin sisters to the Portuguese National Front.

Diamantiano is some sort of Prince Myshkin (the happy-go-lucky protagonist from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot) for the Fifa: set, sweet, honest, trying to be good, but adrift in a corrupt world that has no patience for his sort. It’s also fun watching this impossibly shredded man feast on Nutella, waffles and spray cream throughout the film, a secret diet that works wonders for him.

It all kicks into gear when he adopts a young boy, who’s really a female secret agent pretending to be a Mozambican refugee, and who’s carrying on her affair with another agent who has to pretend to be a nun – it’s that kind of movie. Through the plot’s circumstances, Diamantino and Aisha each end up assuming physical aspects of the other gender. This quietly becomes a striking narrative about gender queer identity, where Diamantino discovers he can fulfil desires he didn’t even know he had.

The relationship that builds between Diamantino and Aisha has a sexual undercurrent that the movie just rolls with. There’s not enough time to wonder about morality with any of this because because Abrantes and Schmidt aren’t using their style to do more than its all just so much fun, so whether or not it means anything is quite beside the point. It builds to this kitch b-movie finale, which is absurd but bursts into a gorgeous final scene of lushious dream imagery. The clear vision of this furiously funny, accessible and over-the-top movie needs a big UK release, where its send-up of football culture, Brexit and celebrity is sorely needed.

Diamantino showed at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On BFI Player in March (2023). Also available on other platforms.

Saint George (São Jorge)

Posted on by victorfraga

In the year of 2011 the Troika bailout program was implemented across Portugal. More than 1,8 million families and companies were in debt, and 60 debt collection agencies engaged in immoral practices on the brink of legality in order to coerce and intimidate people into paying. People who simply didn’t have such money. The outcome was confusion, anger, despair and sometimes even tragedy.

The film opens with the Prayer to Saint George: “I will go dressed and armed with the weapons of Saint George so that my enemies, having feet will not reach me; having hands will not trap me; having eyes will not see me, neither with thought can they cause me harm”. It feels almost like an ironic comment on the predicament of the film’s protagonist. Jorge (Nuno Lopes) is an unemployed boxer struggling to support his child Nelson (David Semedo). The mother Susana (Mariana Nunes) is threatening to take the child back to her birth nation, as she too is struggling to make ends meet.

Jorge finds a job in one of the much-feared debt collectors in order to earn quick money and dissuade Susana from leaving the country. He becomes a henchman prepared to use very obtuse elicitation techniques in order to extract money, daunt and terrorise debtors. His bosses often take him to “casual” collection meetings, as the mere presence of the bulky and muscular male is indeed very frightening. But it’s in the dark of the night, when there’s no one around, that the elicitation techniques get sanguinary.

This is a very dark and somber film. The photography is mostly at night, and the camera remains borderline static throughout the movie. There’s an eerie stillness, just like the country’s economy. People often filmed from outside barren and soulless, making them look like rats in a cage and emphasising their helplessness. The neighbourhoods are poor and derelict, an image you don’t normally associate with EU countries. Much of the action takes place in the Jamaica District of Lisbon, which is populated mostly by marginalised black people. It reminded me a lot of the gypsy district in Slovakia of Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export (2007). They are the forgotten peoples of Europe.

Prejudice is also a central topic of the film. Susana is a black foreigner, from a former Portuguese colony (Brazil). She has been consistently accused of being a “nigger whore” and a gold-digger. She is subjected to racism, xenophobia and misogyny. Unbeknownst to Jorge, his father offered her a large sum of money for an abortion, which she refused. Now she wants to return to Brazil, reversing her immigration route. Europe becomes the doomed continent, while the former colony is promising land. A exotic papaya symbolises the longing for Brazil

There is a touch of hope at the end of the film. Despite a very tragic event, the characters seem to find some sort ofredemption and reconciliation through their complicity. It’s as if people they suddenly realised the cruel nature of capitalism. During a crisis, the most vulnerable are often forced to confront each other; those who should be support each other are instead set against each other.

The Troika ended in 2014, and Portugal has since recovered and become one of the most promising economies of Europe. Saint George serves as a reminder that solidarity and compassion should prevail above corporate interests at times of economic hardship. The Patron Saint of England will protect those who remain loyal to their most humane values. Those are the real weapons at such difficult times.

Saint George is available on all major VoD platforms from November 2017, and it is part of the Walk This Way collection.

Damned Summer (Verão Danado)

Posted on by victorfraga

Youth culture, though it adopts different fashion style and identifies with different musical genres always holds the same ethos; live in total freedom. Chico (Pedro Marujo) certainly endorses such a lifestyle in constantly partying, smoking and drifting through the sun kissed streets Lisbon. A recent graduate of Politics, he is embracing his youth to the full. The narrative of Pedro Cabeleira’s second feature can be summarised in these three activities.

The simplicity of partying and relaxing is later a binary to the heightened mental states and intensity of emotions created during raw techno sounds and drug consumption. To Chico and his friends, every night represents a new possibility, a new crowd to party with and a new girl to get with. Caught in a space of adulthood independence, yet with a disregard for working life, Damned Summer revels in its hedonistic presentations of youth nightlife.

Under Cabeleira’s direction, the film takes a very episodic approach to Chico and his friend’s daily lives in Lisbon. Such cinematic depictions of youth like La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) set in practise a working template which has been adopted right throughout world and European cinema i.e. Eden and After (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970), Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008) and Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2015). The larger than life character which are found in Kassovtiz’s piece are exempt here.

Granted Chico and Co all have a distinct style with the use of mostly non-professional actors adding veracity to the images on screen. Still, in specific scenes they are lost in the highly visual and melodic template of nightlife, specifically electronic music. Though unfair to compare to the greatness of La Haine, as a viewer, you rarely care about what happens to Chico. The heartbeat of any film is character and without that its truly hard to be absorbed- even if Chico does share a passion for electronic music as I do.

Damned Summer’s episodic nature enables Cabeleira and his cinematographer Leonor Teles to shoot different spaces in a vast array of lighting and extreme close-ups. Kudos must also be given to the kaleidoscopic lighting of the rooms in which these parties are thrown. Transforming you into these spaces of freedom, the whole creative team creates coherent visuals to match the rhythmic sounds. Not entirely based in electronic music, the film utilises a multitude of genres to reflect the continual presence of music in Chico and Co daily lives. Bold moments of silence in the midst of the nightlife on the surface juxtapose the constancy of music in darkness. Observing this silence from a higher viewpoint could be used to reference the emptiness to which society views these youth people’s hedonism.

Cabeleira crafts a visually sumptuous film with narrative and character problems. The skill set is there for the director to flourish if he nurtures a script which has feeling and emotion. Still, such problems can be excused at such an early stage of his career.

Damned Summer showed as part of the last Locarno Film Festival, and it is available for online streaming courtesy of Festival Scope until Auigust 20th.

Colo

Posted on by victorfraga

The Portuguese are best known for their unrelenting nostalgia, yearning and suffering. Those familiar with the work of the late filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira (who passed away two years ago still active at the age of 106) will recognise that the pace of Portuguese cinema is not for everyone’s taste. The melancholic and slow rhythm can cause strangement, stupor and even sleepiness in those more used to convoluted scripts and fast action.

The economic crisis of Europe has deeply affected the confidence and the morale of the country. A mother, a father and their daughter Marta slowly see their relatively stable household crumble to pieces. The father is unemployed and vanishes for days without explanation. The mother works tirelessly, but she’s still unable to make ends meet. And Marta befriends pregnant girl at school, who has a very dark secret.

Colo is a warm and deeply feminine movie. A large part of the film takes place inside a maroon-hued middle-class flat somewhere in Lisbon. These three people are seeking some sort of affection, but they are unable to vocalise it. The action in the movie is mostly dispassionate and laconic. The title of the film is Portuguese for “lap”, the most intimate place for rest and nurture. The three people desperately need “colo”, but they are unable to find it.

In the end of the movie, the three family members make very different and unorthodox arrangements so that they can carry on with their respective lives. Despite a couple of peculiar twists and a convincing photography, Colo is just too slow and too long at 136 minutes, and it’s unlikely to appeal to much broader audiences. Unless you are into low-wattage and low-tension prolonged misery.

Colo is showing in the Official Competition of the 67th Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. You can view it online for free between December 1st and 17th as part of the ArteKino Festival.