Tag Archives: portuguese

America a tragic story told in a burlesque and ironic way, within a love triangle. Liza, a beautiful young Russian woman, is married to Victor, a small-time crook who lives on scheming and swindling, born and bred in Portugal. Fernanda, the ex wife, who ten year’s passed decides to drop by, is the gang leader, an Andalusian Spaniard. Victor has to decide which women to follow, Liza cannot really leave him, Fernanda doesn’t really want to stay. The six year old kid hangs everybody by a string. Eastern European newcomers give new business perspectives that are going to rock their small world by the beach: Cova do Vapor. A chaotic neighborhood of precarious housing located at Lisbon’s gates, where the Tagus River meets the Atlantic, where fishermen and retired factory workers coexist. An obscure little place, where everything suddenly changes, even the weather. After a violent storm, the gangster’s house gets a rusted fishing boat hanging on top of their home.
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Woman has to choose between being a prostitute or posing nude for a painter, in order to finance an expensive surgery for her son, his only chance to survive.
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Carlos and Solange, childhood sweethearts, marry after a chaste courtship. On their wedding night, Solange refuses to make love to him. First he pleads, then in anger he rapes her. She says she adores him, but, even after months of marriage, can’t endure his touch. To prove to herself she’s not frigid, she begins a daily routine of seducing strangers on public busses; she also takes Carlos’s best friend to a motel. Carlos figures out that she’s unfaithful and, armed, confronts Solange. Meanwhile, she seeks psychiatric help because she feels no remorse. Will there be violence and death, a psychological breakthrough, or more bus rides?
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The film is based on face-to-face conversations with the Brazilian architect, with an in medias res beginning and a ’spontaneous’ ending: “The interview is over, isn’t it?” asks Niemeyer, when they begin to talk about women as everyday pleasures for the 100 year-old architect. Besides a wide range of the architect’s mostly public buildings in the biggest Brazilian cities, and also in France, Italy and Algeria, director Fabiano Maciel tries to show us the post-war intellectual and political atmosphere in Brazil, and Niemeyer’s relation to it. We also get to know him as a fighter for social justice and about his role in the construction of Brasilia as a symbol of the workers’ movement in the fifties.
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Bored by spending the summer in the city, 15-year-old Rita decides to take a fancy to her new neighbor, a photographer who is setting up an exhibit of his shots in Melanesia. What starts as a game turns into a blazing crush and Rita can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy anymore.
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1978. While the military coup that assaulted Brazil in 1964 starts to teeter, we follow a romance involving an 18 years old soldier and the cultural ringleader of an anarchist cabaret. Tattoo depicts the conflicts and reflections of a whole generation observed from a marginal perspective. Through the vantage point of the exception, the film elucidates the norm.
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All seems lost. And then, in an old, lonely and icy park two shadowy figures meet: those of Deus and a Messenger from God. The Messenger gives the crook (the temporary state of poor João de Deus) a suitcase stuffed with money. His mission accomplished, the Messenger leaves. João counts the bank notes. The silent waters of a nearby lake are disturbed when a heavy object plunges in. João goes to see what is happening. A young girl (Joana) is drowning. João throws himself into the water and carries the unconscious Joana off to a convent (Capucines?). How Responsible! João de Deus returns to the park to recover the case and its precious contents: happily, nothing has been touched…
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After Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998) – nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 2005 Carlos Saura completes his trilogy on modern urban song with Fados. After over two years of research into the subject, Carlos Saura takes an enormous step forward in his approximation to music. If, in his earlier musicals, Iberia, Flamenco, Tango…, he based his work on dancing, in Fados he makes a special effort with the plot and image to reflect the birth of a suburban, dockland music which is in itself a synthesis of all of the music born towards the end of the 19th century.
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This Portuguese drama examines the daily life minutiae and intrigues of two scions of society in the rural village where they live. One is a wealthy landowner, the other a widowed aristocrat who lives in a world of her own. “Starting off from a fine novel by Carlos de Oliveira, Fernando Lopes doesn’t so mush reconstitute a story, but rather defines an atmosphere parallel to that which exists in the literary work. The erosion of time, the crumbling of an epoch, the decline of a stately home, the disintegration of emotions: the film version of A Bee in the Rain talks about all these things, using a language that is sparse and unpolished, fascinating and at the same time repulsive in its disturbing silence” (Lauro Antonio).
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After the structural collapse at a construction site, Paulo loses his job because he denounces the situation to the authorities. His relationship with his wife deteriorates more every day. Anabela, Paulo’s sister, lives with their father, who suffers from post-war syndrome from his involvement in the Colonial Wars. Bela is his nurse, and the only comfort for a terminally ill patient.
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