Le marquis du fado

A piece of surreal art! Watching this film is like to look for a surreal painting for almost 2 hours. The cinematography is completely unique, out of any canon. At least I never saw anything like this, whether in Portuguese or foreign cinema! It's really unique and original as a piece of art must be!

So, this movie is really bizarre but also has a lot of irony and sarcastic humor, with plenty and explicit sexual references. But what is even more interesting is that it assumes all its absurdity and even its dementia... One character of the movie says one thing that I don't know if it's true or not, but here it really makes sense: "Portugal is a country which has one of the most elevated rates of schizophrenic people"! Here, it completely makes sense, because this movie is entirely schizophrenic!

Another interesting feature of this film is to mix this weird and unusual "avant-gard" cinematography with some traditional icons of the Portuguese culture, like Fado or the typical neighbourhoods of Lisbon ("Bica" is a typical neighbourhood which is used as setting to the plot). It makes me remind a Portuguese musician, already deceased, called António Variações, which in the early 80's mixed the innovative and modern elements of electronic music with traditional Portuguese music, creating something different from the rest. I think this quote belongs to him: "My music is somewhere between Minho (a region in the North of Portugal) and New York"! This movie resembles to it I think.

In spite of all this weirdness this movie has a plot. A strange and different one but it has. It's all about ANTÓNIO. "Who is António?" In the beginning he can be anyone, but later we see he assumes different faces and personalities but he's just one. He has many women. He can satisfy 6 women at the same time...

The acting is also strange but exists as well. And it's great, especially from Lúcia Sigalho who does different characters but gives a touch of humor in all of them. Manuel João Vieira ("the King", as someone said) also does a good job in his own particular way. Funny, as always! The other actors work like they were in a silent movie...

To sum up, three words describe this movie: Experimental, abstract and weird. One word describes my opinion about it: Excellent!

This will make many enemies, I have seen them already, but one's got to agree that, even though this movie is no masterpiece of narrative and coherence, it is still a novelty item in all the portuguese cinema, and a barrel of laughs. The acting is out of this world, the memorable moments are countless. Pity that this movie won't work out of Portugal, it's lingo and style is too portuguese. But I'm glad for that. Laughed all the way through it, and for all the good reasons.

Well I went to see this one without knowing much of it...in the end I saw the movie 3 times in the cinema and I laughed like hell (olhó cachalote!...)

By the look of it I think that most of the things said were basically not written in any paper and it came from the inspiration of the actors...well in that matter Lúcia Sigalho and Manuel João Vieira are completely brilliant. Even though they're basically the only ones that talk...(Symba also gives a nice performance) even Nuno Melo and all the others don't need to talk to give a performance better than most guys who win oscars nowadays...

Well I can't actually say much more about the movie, it's quite experimental, so you just better steal a tape from Edgar Pêra or ask RTP2 to broadcast it again, but just figure out this one by yourself...

A interesting point is that I think it took years to finish this one...since money for national productions is something that lacks in this country...but I'm just glad they could actually put this one out there...

There was a good film buried in this somewhere, but there were far too many layers of artiness preventing it from being enjoyable. The central conceit sounds like an appealing idea: a Antonio is described by several different women, each with a vastly differing picture of him. in each of the segments the woman is played the same actress but Antonio is portrayed by a different actor. But it loses all possible appeal in the telling.

I cannot even put into words how oddly this film is directed, as it pushes itself as far as possible outside what you expect a film to be. The sound design is relentlessly ugly, the visuals occasionally interesting but mostly pretentious and unpleasant. All performers were told to overact and gurn for the camera, particularly the lead actress who was equally unpleasant to watch in all her roles, grotesque, over-nuanced cartoon-character monstrosities.

This is a film where within minutes you start asking yourself "is this a joke?" It self-consciously alienates the audience at every turn, telling an empty story with a boring script, and it has almost no redeeming moments whatsoever.