IMPRESSIONISTIC IDIOSSYNCRASIES

DISPATCH #4 FROM INDIELISBOA 2016

I’ve always found it somewhat weird that Portugal’s current premier film festival is somewhat unable to attract top-tier Portuguese films for its competition. Weird it may be, but you really have to know the specifics of the local milieu, and its constant cut-throat jockeying for position and status, to understand why this is. Some of it is understandable — for someone like Pedro Costa, a competition berth at Indie is a step back from Locarno or Cannes, unable to provide the larger exposure an A-list festival gives. Some of it isn’t.

The truth of the matter is, it seems to be a struggle just making sure IndieLisboa even has a competitive section for Portuguese features, and while the festival tries hard every year, it still has to settle for what it can. Also, the fact that so much of the current Portuguese production is working within the mode of creative non-fiction means an unavoidable overlap with what the documentary fest DocLisboa is looking for for its own competition. And yet, the festival has been able to excavate the occasional gem or signpost directors (for instance, Gonçalo Tocha, whose It’s the Earth, not the Moon swept the festival circuit a couple of years ago, won the Portuguese competition with his 2007 debut Balaou).

So, to this year’s Portuguese crop: four features in the official competition, but sadly none that will stick in the mind the way some of its predecessors did. First off the gate was The Room You Take, the second feature from film editor Pedro Filipe Marques, who worked with both Mr Costa (in Colossal Youth) and Miguel Gomes (co-editing the Arabian Nights triptych) and made quite a splash in 2011 with his debut A Nossa Forma de Vida. That film was a patient, observational window into the daily life of an elderly couple (the director’s own grandparents); its follow-up is equally observational but much more ambitious and sprawling and, ultimately, disappointing.

The irony is that, while Mr Marques has extensive experience as an editor, The Room You Take feels like an unfinished edit. Less a straight-forward documentary than a metaphorical essay, the film purports to be a meditation on the current state of culture in Portugal: starting off from the demolition of a Lisbon theatre, it asks what place can a spectator take in a country where venues are shutting down or being demolished, and where culture is an afterthought long being given lip service by the powers that be.

The film aims to shake that complacency and lead the viewer into asking what can he do to reverse course, but it does so in quite a roundabout way; over the course of nearly three hours, Mr Marques cross-edits between animals in a zoo, actors in their dressing-rooms before or after a theatre performance and the ruins of the ABC theatre. His camera is constantly placed in the unseen “reverse shot” position, as a viewer/voyeur placed where the actors usually are, looking not at the stage but beyond it; in so doing underlines how, in a way, everyone, even the viewer, is always performing for an audience, even if it is only an audience of one (or, in one case of pre-performance jitters, two).

Though it shares the observational qualities of A Nossa Forma de Vida, The Room You Take lacks the clarity and linearity of its predecessor. Its sprawling length often feels as if Mr Marques was reluctant to let go of specific sequences even if they added nothing to or merely reiterated what had come before; the prose-poetic voiceover clarifies as much as obfuscates what the director wants to say with the film. As much as I liked parts of it, it felt to me as if The Room You Take was a journey aiming towards a destination it never actually reached.

Two more films have since played the feature-length competition, and albeit with different qualities and flaws, they’re both equally disappointing.

Sérgio Tréfaut’s Treblinka is a relative disappointment. It’s by no means a bad movie, something that the director seems incapable of doing. And if you have followed his work ever since Lisboetas won the initial IndieLisboa competition in 2004 — and his work has indeed travelled — you will recognize many of his traits as a thoughtful storyteller who often takes roundabout paths to get where he wants to go. Having said that, Treblinka, the closest he has ever got to an essay film, doesn’t really seem to want to go anywhere. It’s partly by design, but also partly by accident; this short, hour-long feature began life as a documentary inspired by Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ experience in the WWII Nazi death camps, but somewhere along the way became a sort of “phantom ride” through the railway tracks of 20th century memory.

Drawing on survivor Chil Rajchman’s diary of his life in Treblinka, whose words are spoken off-screen in Russian, a silent unnamed survivor (iconic Portuguese actress Isabel Ruth, muse of the late Paulo Rocha) makes a trans-Siberian train journey haunted by the ghosts of her camp experiences. It’s a screenscape as bleak and chilly as it is seductively enveloping, impeccably realized, but its intelligence isn’t enough to distance it from the ever-growing pack of artworks about the Holocaust, and its slightness suggests it’s either part of a longer, yet incomplete, whole, or an attempt at salvaging a different project that didn’t quite turn out as expected. There’s something here that reminded me of both Mr Tréfaut’s earlier (and more fully realized) true-story essay-fiction, Viagem a Portugal, and of Mauro Herce’s impressionistic Dead Slow Ahead, but I came out of Treblinka certainly impressed but not convinced.

Impressionistic, yes, but to the point of opaqueness, Marcelo Felix’s sophomore effort Paul left me seriously bewildered. I’d really liked Eden’s Ark, his 2011 essay on the recording of history and memory, but this new project, an overly ponderous meta-fictional set of nested Russian dolls surrounding a translator in the process of subtitling a film, lost me about halfway through with its somewhat mystifying insistence in leaving everything open-ended and unexplained. Per the press notes, and a very interesting interview I did with Mr Felix, that vagueness is by design as well, aiming at inviting the viewer to fill in the blanks as it dives from the framing narrative of the translator working on the subtitles into the film she is working on. That film, about a glass blower with identity issues, is designed as part documentary and part 1960s Russian filmmaking, spoken in… Estonian. A Tchekhovian spin-off plot that sees the blower’s supervisor ambling through nature can either be seen a parallel plot line or an entirely different film — but do they exist, are they connected, or is everything merely extrapolated by the translator into her own projections? We’ll never know, and despite the evident care with which Mr Felix constructs his labyrinth (shot with Volta à Terra director João Pedro Plácido as DP), after a while the apparent aimlessness of the project becomes a self-perpetuating motion that doesn’t get anywhere, so there’s not much reason to care anyway.

That’s why it was such a pleasure to find something as forcefully personal and enjoyable as veteran João Botelho’s take on Manoel de Oliveira’s oeuvre. Mr Botelho is an idiosyncratic director with as many hits or misses, but he is also a full-blown cinephile, and one of the many who worships at the throne of the late director, who died in April 2015 at the extraordinary age of 107 and was the defining figure of Portuguese cinema in the 20th century. Mr. de Oliveira himself had a small role in Mr. Botelho’s debut, the quasi-abstract Conversa Acabada, and many of the younger director’s films reflected and refracted in some way the late master’s influence. What he does in Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira and Me is rather wonderfully genre-busting: neither a rigid biographical documentary nor a talking-heads job, closer in spirit to Manuel Mozos’ impressionistic (that word again!) 2014 homage to João Bénard da Costa Others Will Love the Things I Have Loved. It’s almost like attending a master class on film, or seeing a visual equivalent of Robert Bresson’s seminal book of aphorisms Notes on the Cinematographer.

Positing that Mr. de Oliveira never made films but, instead, “cinema”, the film’s first two-thirds are a marvelous primer on his work, with extensive inserts from many of his key pictures, narrated by Mr Botelho himself in a conversational, enthusiastic tone of voice. I have my doubts about the last third, where he dares to film a story Mr. de Oliveira wrote but never shot, as a black-and-white silent melodrama that emulates the style and attempts to invoke the spirit of his late master. For my money, Mr Botelho got there better with his 2008 feature The Northern Land, which could pass easily for a forgotten Oliveira, but the romantic gesture of showing just how much he owes to the director that has come to symbolize Portuguese auteurism is sincere and touching, and makes for a wonderfully enjoyable wotsit that is highly recommended to fans of both directors and to those who would like to know more about Portuguese film and especially Manoel de Oliveira’s extraordinary career.

O LUGAR QUE OCUPAS

PT, 2016, 167 minutes

DIR/CAM, Pedro Filipe Marques; SCR/ED, Mr Marques and Rita Palma; PROD Marta Pessoa, Ms. Palma, Mr. Marques and João Pinto Nogueira; Três Vinténs

TREBLINKA

PT, 2016, 61 minutes

CAST Kirill Kashlikov, Isabel Ruth; NARRATION Mr. Kashlikov, Nina Guerra; DIR/SCR Sérgio Tréfaut, inspired by the book by Chil Rajchman Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory; DP João Ribeiro; MUS Alfredo Costa Monteiro; ED Pedro Marques; PROD Catarina Almeida and Mr. Tréfaut; Faux

PAUL

PT, 2015, 71 minutes

CAST Alice Medeiros, Rómulo Ferreira, Crista Alfaiate, Mafalda Lencastre, Dimitris Mostrous; DIR/SCR/ED Marcelo Félix; DP João Pedro Plácido; MUS Sándor Veress; ART DIR Ana Simões; PROD Isabel Machado and Joana Ferreira; CRIM Produções

O CINEMA, MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA E EU

PT, 2016, 79 minutes

CAST Mariana Dias, António Durães, Ângela Marques, Maria João Pinho, Leonor Silveira, Marcelo Urgeghe, Miguel Nunes; DIR/SCR João Botelho; “The Gloved Woman” based on an original story by Manoel de Oliveira; DP João Ribeiro; MUS Nicholas McNair; ED João Braz; PROD Alexandre Oliveira; Ar de Filmes