Tright here’s a studied impassivity to this elegant Portuguese film about grief from Susana Nobre. It’s a movie that maintains its near-affectless deadpan fashion from first to final, and declines to supply a traditional emotional payoff, or certainly the same old narrative form that may result in such a climax – though there may be an emotional outpouring of kinds. It isn’t precisely that unhappiness finds its outlet in indirect or uncommon methods (the heavy consuming we see is, in spite of everything, a commonplace symptom) however the best way it’s represented on display is oblique.
Helena (Raquel Castro) is a manufacturing supervisor on a movie shoot, coping with a troublesome director. She is divorced, sharing custody of a teen daughter, and in a relationship with a musician who’s away on tour. Her aged widowed mom, who lives in a Lisbon residence block known as Cidade Rabat, the place Helena grew up, is speaking brazenly about her approaching demise and needs Helena to dwell within the flat after she’s gone – an concept that stirs up oppressive feelings.
Helena supplies the narrative voiceover to the movie’s dry prologue, merely displaying the entrance doorways to all of the flats within the constructing and reminiscing concerning the occupants: a usually opaque however intriguing introduction. When her mom dies, Helena has to accompany the coffin to her house city in Garvão within the south, boldly interrupting the funeral to state that her mom was not a believer. Within the succeeding months she will get embarrassingly drunk at a marriage and is later breathalysed and sentenced to group service for driving whereas over the restrict; she is ordered to work at a youth sports activities membership and reprimanded by the proprietor for failing to assist with the washing up.
That have shouldn’t be exactly the lesson in humility that it could be in a Hollywood kind of film; Helena shouldn’t be within the slightest conceited or insensitive, though her teen daughter is a little bit exasperated along with her. Her life simply rolls alongside, resulting in tears – though Nobre doesn’t supercharge these with that means. There’s a refined intelligence at work on this movie, a sympathy that retains it residually alive in your thoughts after the ultimate credit.
