Apparitions of the 19th century in an ever-evolving stage play recounting their lives. Extensions of their world liberated from temporal constraint, traversing landscapes at will. Anachronisms and artifice are interwoven, setting the scene as they mourn those who've left and those left, the contronyms and correlations that house the central thesis of this film. Of death and desire. The restless, fruitless pursuits of perfection. Its ascetic aesthetics showcase precision and discipline; every camera movement, every line delivery, focused to an exact science. Incremental shifts and carefully planned staging transform beautiful tableaux into living, breathing paintings. Its mise-en-scène, sculpted from light and texture, motioned forward by leitmotifs and careful blocking, shots captured in mirrors revealing what's hidden, action and feelings punctuated by the sharp blood-curdling strings of a violin, the dramatic crash of piano keys-it's all so intuitive.
Portuguese cinema, with its illustrative-novelistic style, painterly-theatrical set design, and use of poetic prose, is coupled with the radical techniques of the Japanese New Wave movement. A marriage between different schools of thought in filmmaking hasn't been this successful since 1959's Hiroshima Mon Amour. And with its collision, new expressions emerge. It develops a unique filmic language by taking what preceded it, the DNA of these different cultures, and melds it using the commonalities that overlap. This was also reflected in the multitude of languages spoken across its runtime. Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and English are all recognized as art forms in themselves. It is as much about how words are said as what is spoken. The human voice and body are equally an extension of the composition. Driven by a strong adherence to formalism, rigorous blocking communicates magnitudes with the tilt of a performer's head, the gesticulation of a hand, the shifts in body posture that direct the eye as the camera gracefully moves on, repositioning the sequence, readjusting what's framed; all of it so deliberate, so well-timed. From Manoel de Oliveira to Yoshishige Yoshida, Paulo Rocha's film breathes a richness of deeply enrooted methods.
This also extends to the tone and overall feeling. A deep, sensuous, simmering sentiment cascades over the performances. Their cold, venomous words cut into opposing entities, yet the magnetism between these orbiting bodies remains palpable. Invisible electricity; it's infectious! It circumvents explicit communication while still being comprehensive. It's able to accomplish this because it trusts the language of film. It trusts its ability to communicate things unsaid equally as those that are. And so you understand the shorthand of political descent, the underlying symptoms of a domestic dispute, the feelings of an expat, and their self-imposed exile while still yearning for "home." The unspoken, forbidden tension between lovers-to-be and the emptiness left by lovers' past. For all of its theatricality and poetics, when it comes to capturing the core of the human experience, it never misses. The term "style over substance" is dead; let's bury it. Paulo Rocha gives a masterclass on how substantive "style" can be when executed at this level.
I've seen many films like this before, but never to this degree, to this exactness. It's perfection. I'm intimidated by it. At awe of it. I honestly can't properly articulate why I love this film as much as I do. All the creatives involved were moving on one accord, knowing when to cut and when to linger. When to pan and when to lock down the camera. When to punctuate a moment with sound or to allow silence to become deafening. Every decision was made with confidence; every second was made to count.
It's really "slow and boring," and I love it!
