Aniki bóbó (1942)

A rascally gang of kids roam around town. They ditch school and go to the local toy store. They sit at the harbor and they fight. In the middle of all that, there is an accident; is one of the kids to blame for what happened? Aniki bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira) is neorealism before neorealism: it takes an interest in city life and in ordinary people. The settings - the city of Porto - are vividly portrayed. The problem is that the film also has aspires to edification. The difference between the wide path and the right path is declared in clumsy, overwrought lines. Beyond this aspiration, there is something rather captivating in how the moral conflict is described. With small means, the story places innocent side by side with guilt and remorse. Oliveira studies the hierarchy and the cruelty within a group of kids. There is the poor kid, the bully and the girl everyone fall in love with. The cruelty shown here is not to be seen as 'cute', there is something shattering about how these kids relations are brought to the fore from a perspective of irrevocable events that change everything but that also sheds light on what has been going on for a long time. There is no condescension in how these moral conflicts are treated - or at least such condescension doesn't dominate the film. Oliveira looks at how relations evolve within the flexible borders of play and adventures.

Our Beloved Month of August (2008)

On paper, Our Beloved Month of August (dir. Miguel Gomes) sounds like a wonderful, wonderful film: improvisation, the Portugese countryside, drifting fictional tales. It might have been a bad day when I watched it, but I never felt myself moved by it; instead of enjoying the looseness and the relaxed mood of the film, I was - and this doesn't happen that often - bored. There were things I liked (some of the musical scenes, some of the quieter landscape explorations, some of the storytelling) and had the film focused less on the fictional story, I might have ended up with a more positive verdict. The inclusion of the film team in the story is all right; its quite fun watching anxious producers and the staff trying to explain what they are up to, reassuring everybody about the time table, creating diversions etc. And watching villagers tell coherent and not-so-coherent stories is entertaining as well, It's when the fictional elements take over the film that I'm starting to lose interest; the family drama that was unraveled seemed dull and forced.

Colossal Youth (2006)

You hear about a director and feel a strong urge to watch one of their movie. At the same time: reading about a film beforehand is something I try to avoid; I like a film to overwhelm me (or underwhelm me) without being disturbed by thoughts about how the film has been received and understood among critics. Colossal Youth is a film like that - I am happy that I did not read many words about it, and that while watching it, I had no ready interpretation or description to fall back on, no "this is that kind of movie"-type of judgement. I am also happy about the fact that I had people to discuss the film with afterwards: to watch movies is just as much digesting what one has just seen.

I must confess that Colossal Youth is unlike anything I've seen before. But this is interesting: it is a film that reveals quite little about the characters. We get no tidy image of who these people are. The places we see are presented in very specific frames, rather than through grand and conspicuous panoramas. Even the temporal order of events is quite hazy. And having said this, I'd still want to say that Colossal Youth striked me as a very personal film. The film remains mysterious and the people remain quite enigmatic throughout, but I feel engaged by what Costa presents to me, he encourages to stay in my seat, keep calm, and really, really, look and listen. It's a film that requires patience but I never felt that Costa is the kind of director chosing the snail's pace just for the sake of style. I have a hard time imagining colossal youth could have been made in any other way. The static long takes of the film do not aesthetize - we see what we see, and everything is important (just look at the sparse use of color!). (Sounds are equally important: even though we never see anybody working, we hear work, we hear activity, but what we see is people talking, idling away time, longing for another life).

Colossal Youth comprises a series of encounters. A man, Ventura, goes to meet people, some of which he calls his children. It remains unclear whether they are his children. They talk to him. They watch telly. They eat. They smoke. They drink beer. They sit in parks. They tell stories about life. Ventura tries to make his friend write a letter to his wife, a love poem, a wish for a better life. We learn that many of these people are immigrants from Cap Verde. They live in bad housing. Some houses are about to be torn down, or have been demolished. Ventura goes to look at an apartment where all his children could live. These scenes have an almost dream-like character: the sterile whiteness of the uninhabited spaces, the many rooms and the placid real estate agent. It is things like this that matter: where you live, how you live, how you survive. And scenes like these ones also remind us of Costa's singular technique that has very little to do with social realism in the traditional sense.

Costa does not trade in cheap contrasts between the society of the middle class and the society of the outsiders, of the invisible. We see the reality of these people, and that's enough. Their sense of isolation does not need to be emphasized through images of people who live in lavish luxury. The question the film poses is harder than that, we really have to think and judge: in what ways are these people disconnected, how did it happen, how is this state sustained? Costa's use of space to make us understand the character's world is economical, but it works: we look at how people move, how they sit, slope, and we notice the surroundings in a way that is never relegated to a mere backdrop. This is just as much a film about place and space as it is a film the entire cinematography of which is an exploration of space. The film makes us attend to glaringly white walls, derelic staircases, a naked table, the numb light from a lamp, the strange atmosphere of a museum, the vivid colors of nature, even urban nature. But most of all - these locations are not mere geographical points, they are attached emotionally, as spaces of desolation, eviction and suspension, spaces where nothing happens, or when a memory starts to unfold, or space as a space for dreaming, hoping - but also where hope is muted into something else.

Der Stand der Dinge (1982)

What's the matter with me? I'm watching a Wim Wenders movie - again! The story told about this movie is that Wenders did a film in Hollywood. Lots of things went wrong. The process was interrupted and Wenders went to Portugal, where he found a film crew that had run out of money. Then he made a film, The State of Things, in which Hollywood is bashed. In the beginning of the film, we see a film team in action. They make a B-movie. It turns out there is no more film and no more money either. The crew, stranded in Lisbon, try to occupy themselves. The director goes to L.A. to hunt down the producer, with fatal consequences.
Wenders attempts to show how real life have no stories but how we try to think that we need "stories". Alas - as soon as the film crew is deserted by their producers, the film falls apart, the story starts to wander. The anti-story theme is also explicity elaborated in the dialogue of the film - sometimes not too subtly.  “Stories only exist in stories, whereas life goes by in the course of time without the need to turn out stories”. Errr.
The cinematography, dusty black-and-white, works perfectly to capture the trudging rhytm of the film. But many scenes were far too pretentious (the problem I have with some of Jarmusch's work). However, I must admit that the last 15 minutes, chronicling the re-union of director & producer, were awesome. Here, he builds up some tension and there is also a hint of comedy.
This is not the worst film about movie-making. Wenders might be self-obsessed, but Godard and Fellini are still in a league of their own.