ARABIAN NIGHTS (As Mil e uma Noites, 2015)

Miguel Gomes' project isn't as voluminous as it could be -- I say this with Out 1 still fresh in my memory --  but at 6 hours, 22 minutes, his phantasmagorical satire can at least claim to do justice to the title it appropriates. Gomes made his name in arthouse circles with his 2012 picture Tabu. His new subject was Portugal's austerity regime, though only a relatively small fraction of the three-part picture confronts economic policy directly. Arabian Nights combines actuality footage of current events in Portugal, from the opening vignette of the closing of a shipyard to massive protests by the nation's police, with a magical realism that proves a curious way to illustrate both the impact of globalization and the Portuguese people's apparent subjection to the whims of higher powers.

 

 

The perils of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate), who must beguile her caliph with stories to stay alive from night to night, are an allegory for both the threat austerity poses to filmmakers like Gomes, who depend in part on state subsidies, and the challenge the director sets for himself with his long project. Her stories range from the ribald tales we may associate with the original "Arabian Nights," especially the first film's "The Men With the Hard-Ons," to the virtual documentary narrative, "The Inebriating Song of the Chaffinches" (surely the right word is "Intoxicating") that takes up most of the third film. Gomes' hope is that his framing device will encourage audiences to approach the wide variety of subject matter he offers with equal curiosity and sympathy, that we might discover something as wondrous in the competition of birdsong collectors as we may in the more fantastical stories.

 

 

It's probably a good idea for Gomes to get his most spiteful tale, "Men With the Hard-Ons," out of the way early. In it, the bureaucrats and hacks negotiating some austerity-era deal meet a wizard who offers the men in the group perpetual erections for a hefty price, only to give them a further taste of their own medicine by demanding another payoff when tumescence proves bothersome or inconvenient. This episode's ad hominem attitude toward its subjects contrasts with the more humane tone that prevails through most of the project. More typical, if not the entire project's signature episode, is "The Tears of the Judge" in the second film. The judge holds court in a little amphitheatre that eventually fills with an exotic collection of characters, each invoked to explain the circumstances of the person before, from animal-costumed bandits to Chinese immigrants to a genie and the ghost of a cow. The endless interconnectedness of it all makes for riveting and sometimes hilarious viewing, and Arabian Nights is at its best when it juxtaposes the mundane and the magical in one frame to inform our view of the world we live in.

 

 

 

The third and final film may seem at first glance like Gomes was slapping stuff together just to have a trilogy without achieving any closure -- Scheherazade is little more than halfway done when the film ends and there's no wrap-up to her story -- but it has some of the project's most memorable moments. She has more screen time here than in the other films, confessing to her father her fatigue and fear when they meet in an amusement park after encountering such odd creatures as an annoying air genie and the sexually prolific Paddleman. Gomes makes an interesting point of emphasizing how many possibly fascinating folk and phenomena he shows us that Scheherazade will never discover or describe, which may be his way of preparing us for an open-ended conclusion without a conclusion. As the character disappears, not even to be heard but rather quoted in title cards as she spends day after day after day telling of the chaffinches and their masters, or taking off on the occasional tangent, viewers might wonder why her head hadn't rolled already. But Gomes manages to make the birdsong saga worthy of at least some of our attention, while the major digression of "The Tale of Hot Forest" is a tour de force of layered meaning. We see the police protest footage I mentioned earlier, a public action on an epic scale, while we hear the Chinese narrative of an exchange student -- the title character of the tale -- who has an affair with a policeman (also involved with the chaffinches) before getting deported, and over that we hear the Glenn Miller Orchestra's version of "Perfidia," the virtual theme song of the third film. The juxtaposition may make no obvious sense, except to emphasize the constant juxtapositions of our globalized existence, but the cumulative effect is dazzling. In its own way, so is the climactic tracking shot of the chaffinch trainer Chico Chapas taking a very long walk through the hills, after one more moment of fantasy with the rescue of a genie caught in a chaffinch trap. If there's no real ending of the story, Gomes seems to tell us with this sequence that that's because things are still moving and probably will never stop, even though his film must.

OSSOS (1997)

Pedro Costa is probably the best director in Portugal under the age of 100. I first started noticing his name a few years ago when film critics were touting his Colossal Youth as one of the greatest yet little-seen films of the decade. That film is now canonized in the Criterion Collection as the final installment of a trilogy of films set in the impoverished Fontainhas section of Lisbon. That trilogy began with Ossos ("Bones"), which reminded me in content of the tales of lowlife youth made by the Dardenne brothers in Belgium. It's the story of the people caught up in a young, poor couple's crisis over a newborn baby. Neither mother (Mariya Lipkina) nor father (Nuno Vaz) has any real idea of what to do with the baby, whom Costa often shows lying around like a piece of junk or mislaid clothing. The most the dad can think of is to carry it around as a panhandling aid. He begs for money to get food for the baby, then spends it on booze. The baby ends up in a hospital, pried by force from the father's hands, and its treatment brings a nurse, Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), into the story. She's more capable and probably more willing to take care of the baby than either of its parents, but the father is determined to make money off the transaction. If he can't sell it to Eduarda, he'll try someone else. The plot is such that the young mother ends up working a day as Eduarda's cleaning lady, finishing her shift by attempting suicide via the kitchen oven. The compassionate nurse tries to befriend this wretch, only to discover the connection between the girl and the guy with the baby who uses her apartment as a crash pad. This connection is already all too well known to the girl's friend Clotilde (Vanda Duarte, a real-life slum dweller and heroin addict who would play herself in Costa's follow-up film), who also figures out that oven's destructive potential....

  

 

It's squalid stuff, but Costa aestheticizes it to an almost alarming degree. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel have maximized the slum's picturesque potential; you can tell that they've combed every corner to find the best camera angles, the most cinematic colors and textures of buildings. Ossos has a paradoxical beauty that's perhaps intended as an aid to compassion, and the actors often become icons of mood, frozen in long, mute close-ups. Costa clearly has a powerful pictorial sense, but his film left me wondering whether his painterly compositions honestly represented the experience of living in Fontainhas or the way its people see their slumscape. A rougher, less thoroughly composed style might have been more appropriate, but that depends on Costa's ultimate purpose. Whatever my qualms, Ossos was a beautiful film to look at, and often effectively so. Costa works in a European style that requires attentive viewing, and his direction is assured enough that your attention is usually justified. It's also worth suggesting that Costa himself may have had second thoughts about his approach, since the later Fontainhas films, In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, abandon the widescreen format while reportedly retaining a distinctive aesthetic identity. I was impressed enough by Ossos to see how those other films look.

This trailer uploaded by CineLuso is much more edit-happy than the film itself -- those opening shots of the guy walking down the street are from one long tracking shot -- but it does give you an idea of what goes on in the film. Check it out.

ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE HAIRED GIRL (Singularidades de uma rapariga loura, 2009)

When a centenarian sets himself to writing and directing a feature film, you should probably cut him some slack. Manoel de Oliveira's updating of a story by Portuguese literary lion Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz runs only 63 minutes, and that's with several digressions. But Oliveira, who's been making movies since the 1930s, is a man in a hurry. By the time I saw this film, he'd already released another feature (previewed on the Cinema Guild DVD, The Strange Case of Angelica looks quite promising), and IMDB reports that the 102 year old director (his birthday was Saturday) has yet another in pre-production. He also batted out a short subject, in which the characters of a Renaissance painting comment on its symbolism and relevance, earlier this year. So if 63 minutes seems short for a feature -- as it's been for the last sixty years or so -- Oliveira's entitled to some indulgence, if not to a bit of awe. Not many people have made films in their nineties -- Clint Eastwood may get there if he stays healthy and interested -- but Oliveira sets records every time he calls action on the set.

To what purpose, however? By now, Oliveira is a celebrity of global cinema by virtue of his age, but are his recent films any good? I can't say, except to note that I've seen and liked I'm Going Home, from back when the director was a mere nonagenarian. This is the first Oliveira I've seen since then, thanks to the Albany Public Library -- though you can also see it on a Netflix stream. It has some interesting visuals, but in its brevity it seems simply to stop rather than end properly.

It's the story of Macario, a department store clerk who grows infatuated with the titular blond. She lives next door to him, and he can see her looking out her window and waving her Chinese fan from his computer desk. Bit by bit he finds out more about her, though he ignores an important warning sign when she shoplifts 150 euros worth of goods from his store, where his uncle is the owner and his boss. That news seems strange, since Luisa moves in exalted social and cultural circles where Macario is but an interloper. Conscious of his poverty, he impoverishes himself further by quitting his job, but resolves to make good on some venture in Cape Verde in order to earn Luisa's love. His fortunes rise, fall, and rise again, but the importance of wealth and the worth of Luisa are thrown into doubt when her shoplifiting compulsion overcomes her at the jewelry store while Macario is shopping for her wedding ring.

Macario (Ricardo Trepa) notices the blonde across the way (above) and sneaks a closer look (below).

The story betrays its 19th century origins and its emphasis on a young man striving for social recognition by the moneyed elite, though Oliveira updates it with comments on the precarious state of the present-day Portuguese economy. There's a whiff of satire in Macario and Luisa's adventures in a high culture in which neither seems greatly interested. Macario gets to meet her at a swanky literary salon where harp solos and socially-conscious poetry recitals are featured, but the young lovers prove more interested first in each other, and then in a card game away from the cultural events. Their objectification of each other is highlighted by the set design, in which their apartment windows are made to look like picture frames on gallery walls. Oliveira plays with framing throughout the picture, making the most of windows and mirrors in shots that show his attention to composition in depth. In the gambling-table scene, a man reading poetry in the salon can be seen deep in the background, as if an ignored picture, while the lovers hover over the game. Whatever you make of his narrative skills, Oliveira still has an intelligent pictorial sense that may look deceptively modest in its lack of flash or flourish. Even the framing sequence shots of Macario narrating his story to a fellow passenger on a train are handsomely arranged to make the hurtling landscape a lively backdrop for the seated pair. This is the sort of picture where you have to watch carefully for subtleties of expression or gesture during long takes that may or may not be typical of very elderly directors.

Composition in depth: Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein) sits down to cards as a figure in the background declaims the poetry of Fernando Pessoa.

Eccentricities is a film without real closure or a "why." If you want an explanation of Luisa's kleptomania, don't hold your breath. Whether Eca de Queiros thought it required explanation or not, I can't say, and it's enough for Oliveira to show that it ultimately disillusions Macario. Let's say he doesn't offer the closure an American audience would probably expect, but the type of film Oliveira makes may not require it. We might also question the point of the flashback format, but many 19th century stories are written in that indirect fashion, as stories of characters telling stories. Oliveira isn't quite a living link to the 19th century, but he appears dedicated to sustaining a cultural continuity linking the 19th to the 21st. Above all, Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl impresses me as a rigorously civilized film by a director who's probably quite conscious of his place in history in several senses of the term. I recommend it as a curiosity above all, or a kind of tribute to human potential, but some people may make more of it than that.