O Milagre segundo Salomé

With the Portuguese virtually force-fed American product, Portuguese cinema gets a bad press locally. It gets hardly any at all internationally, apart perhaps for Manoel de Oliveira, much loved on the art-house circuit.

So it's refreshing to be able to recommend a Portuguese film now and then. In the last couple of years there have been quite a few as the Portuguese film-makers begin to realize that there's an audience out there wanting films that entertain.

'Salomé' is just such a film. Set in the early 20th Century, it centres on Judite, a warm-hearted prostitute, played by the lovely Margarida Miranda, who gets a bit of luck and a chance to get out of the (very well depicted) brothel she 'works' in when banker Nicolau Breyner (excellent!) takes a shine to her.

Her life then begins a headlong rush towards a tragic finale that takes in political shenanigans and the Fátima apparitions along the way, suggesting an intriguing theory for the latter story.

It's all beautifully designed, the performances are uniformly good and the story is coherent and touching. This is Portuguese cinema at its best, and while it may not tempt too many Portuguese away from their staple diet of Hollywood blockbusters, it certainly deserves to, and is a massive step in the right direction.

A beautiful movie from the visual point of view. Excellent interior sceneries and framings, a very steady players direction and a superb performance of the main actors and actresses. Sequence of images and scenes fluid and pleasant. So what's the movie's flaw after all? We are told a story of a pretty young prostitute of a luxury brothel frequented by rich and important men like politicians, bankers, generals and even judges (at least one Supreme Court judge is seen there). One of them, an important banker, falls in love with her and takes her to live with him. But from then on a succession of sentimental dramatic episodes take place relating the girl's behaviour with events that occurred in Portugal after the date in 1917 when 3 children shepherds (one boy and two girls) declared they had seen and listened to the Virgin Mary Who had appeared to them on the top of a holm-oak which has been accepted by the Catholic Church constituting what is called The Miracle of Fatima. This succession of episodes is somewhat slack with a few unexplained and inconsistent details. The pity is that these contents don't correspond with the brilliant movie form.

I've only watched two Portuguese films so I'm no expert on it's cinema but I just loved this film. It's sweet, moving, funny, dramatic, tearful, intriguing and truly heart felt. You can totally understand why all the men love Salome. How can you not? You really feel like if she was real she could see into your soul. The character is one of the most "real" feeling characters I've seen in cinema in a long time. It's a film that just feels authentic, you never find yourself doubting it's authenticity. The actors were perfect, the script was great, the sets fantastic and the directing seemed flawless. I reckon even if you don't like foreign films you would love this one. It is a film worth reading the subtitles for.