Sangue do Meu Sangue

This is a movie that i'll never forget. Rita Blanco is in the best (and when i say the best i mean the best) performance i've ever seen in cinema. Yes, i know - i'm Portuguese, it's predictable i would say this is a great movie. But the truth is that Joao Canijo sees the cinema exactly how i see it, going deep on characters and going deep on their misery, always with a peace of comedy and truth in it. it's not a complicated history, the sexual content in it it's not unnecessary and the music background was not written by big contemporany compositors. The only concern of Joao was to make a movie faithful to the inconditional love story behind a poor family with huge problems appearing.

Joᾶo Canijo is indisputably one of the most interesting contemporary Portuguese movie directors. The four films seen to date, have left an indelible impression on me: Ganhar a Vida, Sapatos Pretos, Noite Escuro and recently Sangue do meu Sangue. His films send a punch to the viewers' guts leaving them breathless, knocked out; they abandon the moviehouse dazed by scenes that will haunt them for days to come.

Sangue do meu Sangue is set in the low working-class Bairro do Padre Cruz, a slum northeast of Lisbon, target to recent architectural projects and municipal efforts to efface its notoriously shady reputation. The film depicts a crosscut of three social classes: firstly the low working class Márcia and her family belong to; secondly the even less privileged Lisbon residents sharing with African immigrants a labyrinthine sub-world reminiscent of what Pedro Costa's trilogy on Fontainhas portrays. Finally the upper middle class represented by the Doctor and his wife living a Portuguese version of the "American dream": active professionals with a daughter who reside in an up-market dream home, two cars in the driveway and a servant at madam's beck and call.

Like Canijo's other films, Sangue to meu Sangue evolves around a central feminine character, Márcia, a single mother who has brought up and supported two children and a live-in sister. The women in Canijo's films are true heroines, resilient but nonetheless victims of their male chauvinistic environment; they inevitably fall prey to the violence perpetrated by men around them, be those pivotal male figures in their lives or simply placed in their paths by destiny. Indeed destiny plays an important role in the scripts Canijo writes. In Sangue do meu Sangue destiny has Cláudia falling in love with a married man linked in some way to her mother's past ─ I'll say no more, not wanting to include a spoiler. Destiny too has a devastating humiliation in store for Ivete, Márcia's sister, at the hands of a ruthless man she doesn't recognize at a karaoke; he remembers her from their schooldays when he had a crush on her. Likewise Márcia attempts to shake off her daughter's destiny, endeavouring at all costs to stop her daughter's love affair with a married man. Claúdia is gullible enough to believe an older married man will jeopardize the cushiness of his marital life, casting off wife and child in exchange for her. Márcia is above all most preoccupied with thwarting the oepidal twist in Canijo's script evoking Greek tragedy. In Greek tragedy no-one can escape what the gods have ordained for them. Canijo plays with the spectator, builds our hopes up that his characters trapped in their precariously balanced lives may just pull through, but just when Joca appears in a deus ex machina ploy to defend his aunt Ivete, we realize that his destiny was to end up behind bars as an adult for a crime graver than what had previously sent him to a reformatory as a minor.

Modern tragedy allows for pathos in ordinary men whose quotidian lives we identify with. The moving relationship between Ivete and her nephew Joca rings of incest. Márcia is busy salvaging her daughter's future whereas Ivete takes upon herself the mission of safeguarding her nephew whose life is jeopardized by an unpaid debt. An unforgettable scene is Ivete and Jaco making their way through the narrow, unsightly, claustrophobic streets of the slum to the house of the drug dealer to settle Joca's debt. We sense imminent danger and the foreboding uneasiness of walking into a maze with no exit, a throwback to the Minotaur of Greek mythology awaiting his victims about to enter his domain. This family's financial constraints oblige them to share a reduced space. Canijo plays and uses this limitation to his advantage; he places the characters in a trap. Márcia, the siblings Cláudia and Joca and her sister Ivete are forced to stretch their capacity for cohabitation to the limit. So reduced a space leaves no room for secrets, the characters learn to lower their voices to maintain a privacy of sorts ─ even when what would really suit them would be to seek relief in shouting out their woes at the top of their voices ─ secrecy is too rare a luxury in a house where mother and daughter share a a tiny bedroom and bed, four people share a tiny bathroom sometimes peeing with the door open, and watching TV means sitting cramped on the settee legs stretched out over the other occupant's lap. Conversation is interrupted by someone crossing the room to get something, by someone coming out of the bathroom, by the normal comings and goings that the house by its nature and especially size imposes on the life of its occupants. Canijo at times divides the screen into two keeping discrete but parallel conversations going simultaneously; not unlike when in an opera a quartet sings, each couple busy with their own theme. This requires the spectators'maximum attention opting for the conversation which contributes more to unfolding of the melodrama.

Above all Canijo's great sense of tempo never lets a scene drag (a common trait to Portuguese cinema). His has an uncanny ability to build crescendo. We become entranced despite the ominous certainty that the ending is bound to be harrowing.

Rita Blanco, Anabela Moreira and Teresa Tavares render magnificent performances. Due praise to Anabela Moreira for what must have been an awfully difficult shooting experience of total frontal and back nudity picked up by the camera with the crudity Canijo's hyper-realism requires. Nothing like it since Isabela Rosselini in Blue Velvet. Mesmerizing and moving is the dignity Moreira imbues her character with, an air of "you can do what you like with my body but you'll never have my soul". The love she professes for her nephew, blood of her blood, which is what the film's title means, elevates her above the sordidness her sacrifice plunges her into.

I hope the members of the Academy see Blood of My Blood and nominate the film for Best Foreign Language Film. It is a Cassavetes/Scorsese/Tarantino kind of thriller, that will dry your goats. It's a thriller made of human dramas, rather than suspense or action, with great acting and a modern way of filming. Director Joao Canijo made use of surround sound and camera angles in order to have a complete view of two sequences/discussions at the same time, making ich view more defying.

Besides, Portugal never got a nomination from the Academy, and in the current crisis, no film is being produced or will be if we don't get this recognition. Nominating it will be a statement for Portugal to continue to have an industry.

Portuguese director Joao Canijo returns with his eighth feature, Blood of My Blood, (his first fictional outing since 2007's Misbegotten) a sprawling, all consuming portrait of one week in the life a matriarchal run familial unit in the slums outside Lisbon, and may indeed be his masterpiece. Inevitably, there's no denying a comparison of technique with Altman and Mike Leigh (Canijo spent two years developing the characters with the actors via a series of workshops as Leigh does), but the film stands quite firmly as an often uncomfortable, unpleasant, and always fascinating family saga that would, in a fair world, finally open up the English speaking market to Canijo's previous directorial efforts, which date back to the early 80s.

In Padre Cruz, a slum on the edge of Lisbon, the Fialho clan, whose workable, but makeshift daily existence is about to be severely shaken. The family matriarch, Marcia (Rita Blanco) has singlehandedly raised her two children, Joca (Rafael Morais) and Claudia (Cleia Almeida), and she works in a restaurant where she has a distant but apparently fulfilling relationship with Helder (Fernando Luis). Marcia's younger sister, Ivete (Anabela Moreira), a hairdresser, also lives with them, her goal to get breast implants in an effort to retain her waning sex appeal, as time seems to be taking its toll on her. Besides daily squabbles and bickering between the usual amiable relatives, which includes Joca's girlfriend, Erica (Wilma de Brito) and Claudia's boyfriend, Cesar (Francisco Tavares) who works a security guard at the same grocery story with Claudia, it's Marcia's children that create a situation that not even the fierce convictions of their flinty mother can put right.

We first meet Joca as he explains to Telmo (Nuno Lopes), the dealer he works for, that he has just been robbed by the buyer he had been sent to meet. Telmo doesn't take this news too easily, and we learn that wild child Joca has been in prison already for drug trafficking. But Telmo's not so sure that Joca's being up front with his missing drugs. Meanwhile, Claudia, currently going to nursing school and planning a wedding with the jealous and needy Cesar, tells her mother she's in love with a married man. Marcia discovers the man, Alberto (Marcello Urgeghe) is one of Claudia's teachers, and travels to Alberto's fancy, upscale neighborhood to confront him about his relationship with Claudia. Throughout several interactions between Alberto and Claudio, we learn varying bits of information that complicate the situation, though something drastic has to take place before either Alberto or Claudia decide to listen to Marcia.

Canijo employs a novel split screen technique in his opening frames, which he repeats several times throughout the feature, using the camera to dissect rooms, using only a wall as separation. On one side, Joca and Telmo heatedly bickering about drug money, with Telmo's two young daughters delicately listening at the breakfast table on the other side, and so on. Canijo often catches characters in the same room or an adjacent space, their conversations overlapping at the same time. But as the film progresses, these busied frames give way to solemn close-ups, grotesquely calming the background to focus on the important and prophetic details we need to clue in on, not unlike tightening the coil of a noose. Even a karaoke bar (presented by Lord Jim Karaoke, a possible nod to Conrad's classic novel concerning the abandonment of a ship in distress) gives us competing, overlapping songs, with Cesar singing a Joe Cocker duet and Ivete crooning "Just Too Good To Be True," to Telmo, a tune which will haunt us again later. We soon leave behind the eerie green nighttime glow in Marcia's apartment, where the camera roves around the property like a hungry insect, until we end up in one sweaty, dark apartment where we observe one of the most upsettingly degrading scenarios (employing, once again, the Four Seasons) you're apt to see this year for the (almost) final outcome of the foolhardy actions of Joca and Claudia.

The two year character preparation obviously paid off for Canijo and his cast. There's definitely a fluidity between the Fialho's, even as they wander through the more sensationally salacious aspects of the narrative. A longer version, clocking in at over three hours, exists, and the material has also been prepared to air in a three part episode version for television, perhaps a more accessible venue due to its lengthy, but utterly worthwhile, running time. After its final frames, you can't help but ruminate on the monstrously perverted notions of the lengths people are willing to go (as well as what they're not willing to do) for those that are considered, in this perfectly titled film, Blood of My Blood.

This sprawling drama about a Portuguese family combines melodrama and social realism so inventively that it practically occupies a genre of its own. Writer-director Joao Canijo grounds the movie in vivid observations of the Lisbon public housing complex where much of the action occurs, and his characterizations—developed, Mike Leigh-style, in close collaboration with the cast--have a similarly gritty authenticity. Yet the movie is also richly stylized, with old- fashioned tracking shots and compositions that allow for two conversations at once, and some narrative developments have the force of Greek tragedy. What emerges is an operatic portrayal of the working poor in which each character's struggle seems monumental. Rita Blanco and Rafael Morais are on top of their game with such deep and complex acting that makes us shiver. One of the best movies I've seen, ever! And definitely the best of 2011.