Recollections of the Yellow House (Recordações da Casa Amarela)

 

Erich von Stroheim from Blind Husbands (1919)

Count Orlak from Nosferatu (1922)

Director João César Monteiro

 

 

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE (Recordações da Casa Amarela)       B            Portugal  (122 mi)  1989  d: João César Monteiro

Back home they called the prison “the yellow house.”  Sometimes when we kids played in the streets, we used to take a look at the dark and silent bars on the high windows.  Full of awe we’d say: “Poor buggers!...”  Here we are on our own once again.  This is all so slow, so heavy, so sad…I shall be old soon.  Then it will all be over.  So many people have come into this bedroom.  They said things that didn’t mean much to me.  They left.  They grew old.  Became slow and miserable, each one in his own corner of the world.                                       —opening intertitle

Portugal’s João César Monteiro is one of the more controversial filmmakers, directing only 12 features in his lifetime, writing and starring in all of them.  With an affiliation for poetry, painting, theater, literature, and music, his films are known for their literary components, given a painterly look, typically concerned with matters of the spirit as much as those of the body, where his films are seen as an extension of all the other artforms.  In the early 1970’s, the Carnation Revolution ended more than four decades of fascism in Portugal, spawning a new generation of filmmakers with a distinctively literary mindset, all in the shadow of its modern national poet, Fernando Pessoa, creating a fusion of artistic, cinematic, and literary inspirations.  Part of Portuguese New Cinema, there’s a poetic melancholy, even sadness, in its overall tone in how it portrays a certain lingering “malaise,” which is captured in the shootings of the narrow Lisbon streets.  This sixth feature and breakthrough work had a brief run in America, but like all of his films, never found a distributor.  According to Paulo Branco, Monteiro’s producer and longtime friend, “If there was ever someone who lived completely free, where life and creativity always intertwined, it was João César Monteiro.  He never conformed to any rules and always brought a sense of ‘madness’ to his work— something he proudly embraced.  That’s why his films are so essential and unique in world cinema.”  A profoundly eccentric actor-director, his films are long, deadpan black comedies, minimally plotted and slow moving, where many consider this morbidly perverse film his masterpiece, often described as a visual poem.  Focused on a solitary character of Monteiro himself, this film introduces us to the alter-ego character of João de Deus (John of God), named after the Portuguese-born patron saint of the destitute, an aged, slim and balding man wearing spectacles, a comic everyman and misfit, or Holy Fool, spending his days wandering between an old boarding house and Lisbon’s historic, decadent neighborhoods.  Verging from a sophisticated artist and European gentleman whispering poetry to a lecherous old man, with an unorthodox and obsessively perverse sexual imagination, his lonely life is peppered with degenerate sexual fantasies that when acted upon produce disastrous results.  João is an incorrigible womanizer, as his erotic fetishes border on depravity, like his leering almost predatory attraction to beautiful young women and his mad obsession with collecting pubic hair, becoming such a controversial and polarizing figure that it’s difficult to feel sympathy. Subtitled “A Portuguese Comedy,” Monteiro explores the idea of whether or not his lecherous protagonist is crazy, or whether he’s being stifled by an insane world, choosing a life of great austerity, living an ascetic life, most of the time feeling imprisoned by the world around him, remaining aloof and isolated, like a stranger in his own country.  Stately and elegant, and often hilarious, Monteiro’s films exhibit a refined satire and social commentary, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, where he is Portugal’s answer to Spain’s Luis Buñuel, yet less well known and more difficult to appreciate, with plenty of Buñuelian pokes at fascism and religion. 

Beginning as a poet and film critic, arguably the most brilliant and acutely intellectual critic in Portugal, writing several years for the newspaper Público before transitioning to a filmmaker, like most of the French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, studying at the London Film School, then known as the London School of Film Technique, where this recalls the subliminal messaging and existentialist mindset of Antoine Roquentin, the melancholic and socially isolated intellectual protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 psychological novel, Nausea.  Monteiro has claimed that all his films are essentially remakes of THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), explaining there are two possibilities of cinema, the real and the imaginary.  “Dorothy lives in the countryside in Kansas: she’s bored with her daily life and she dreams about another place — and that place is cinema in Technicolor.  In a way, every film I’ve made deals with this kind of feeling — let’s see what Kansas can bring to Oz and what Oz can change in Kansas.”  Winner of the Silver Lion (3rd Place) at the Venice Film Festival, with cinematography by José António Loureiro, shot on 35mm in natural, realistic settings, such as streets, buildings, and interior rooms, where the long opening shot from the water overlooking the city shows us Lisbon in a way we’ve never seen before.  With an introductory acknowledgment of the music of both Schubert and Vivaldi, each adds a degree of cultural refinement, starting with the familiar refrains of a theme so prominently featured in Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975), Barry Lyndon, Trio op 100 (Schubert) YouTube (4:16), branching out to the delicately ethereal, Schubert - Notturno in E flat major, Op. 148, D. 897 YouTube (9:45), before reaching for the religious sublime, Vivaldi: Stabat Mater YouTube (19:01).  Living in a cheap room in a family boarding house in the old section of the city’s waterfront, the film starts out in a state of miserablism and discomfort, as João is besieged by bedbugs in the middle of the night, growing contemptuous of their mere existence, disappearing from view at the first sign of light, like blood-sucking vampires, a reference that comes into play later in the film, yet taking a certain amount of pleasure in bringing the problem to his tyrannical landlady Violeta (Manuela de Freitas), an insufferable woman who offers a speech about the rich history of the building, once home to prominent dignitaries, yet the last thing she needs is an infestation, so immediate action is necessary.  João takes great satisfaction in hearing the crackling sound of the mattress burning, as the tiny little critters meet their demise.  While it’s also clear this is a seedy establishment, João is a Quixotic sensualist, a grizzled, depressive man living a solitary life, where his misadventures suggest an isolated Dostoyevskian outcast, with his bitter, internalized rants playing out like Notes from Underground, finding humor and eroticism in a way that no one else could imitate.  Bleakly absurdist, our unlikely protagonist ruminates on illness and the prospect of death.  As if to stave off the inevitable, he develops a Peeping Tom fixation on the landlady’s virtuous, clarinet-playing daughter Julieta (Teresa Calado), who is thirty years younger, stealing peeks though her door at night or while taking a bath, and then afterwards he inhales and drinks her soapy bath water, taking extreme pleasure at finding a single pubic hair, enamored by the intimacy it represents. 

Having no visible means of support, João shows no signs of remorse with taking money from his 70-year old mother (Maria Ângela Violeta), who still works as a cleaning lady, while he’s not above earning money by nefarious means, like blackmail, suggesting he’s a thoroughly unethical character, developing a healthy contempt for those around him, even stealing money from Mimi (Sabina Sacchi), the neighboring prostitute who has just died, taking money hidden away to pay for her daughter’s upbringing.  Suddenly feeling invincible with his newfound wealth, he initially flatters Julieta with promises before turning into a seduction/rape scene, cutting to an abrupt image of a Beethoven bust, shot from João’s point of view, while Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ferociously erupts on the soundtrack as he literally pounces on her just as her mother walks in, throwing all his money at her half-naked body, quickly running away in disgrace.  In one of the more hilarious showstopper scenes of the film, all the women of the neighborhood can be heard opening their window shutters to communally share salacious gossip on the incident while offering obscenities about what a raging pervert he is, unsparing in their graphic detail.  Suddenly confronted by the harshness of the city, things go off the rails after that, as João becomes a homeless tramp, sleeping on garden benches and lining up for soup kitchens, which gives Monteiro the opportunity to document the lives of the homeless elderly in Lisbon.  But when he inexplicably starts strutting around in a stolen military uniform, he is arrested and sent to a psychiatric sanitarium.  Of note, Monteiro was locked up in a psychiatric institution for a brief period of time in his youth.  The mood of the film shifts substantially, as he’s suddenly surrounded by mental instability, making him seem more level-headed and sane than they are, but of dubious moral character.  The boarding house and the asylum can be read as metaphoric extensions of the nation, both ruled by eccentric yet strong-willed authoritarians.  One of the more remarkable cinematic references comes into play as Monteiro reaches back into cinema history, specifically Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922), where Count Orlok’s physical resemblance to João is striking, suggesting those with exquisitely fine aristocratic manners can carry out despicable criminal acts, becoming, in effect, monsters that walk amongst us.  Equally as tantalizing is a moment when he and Mimi have a sexual encounter, but the camera moves away from them and shifts to a slow pan of the giant figure of a man in a sleek white uniform, who is none other than Erich von Stroheim in BLIND HUSBANDS (1919), a Chevalier and dapperly dressed ladies man who comes to personify his suddenly inflated ego.  After escaping from the asylum, we’re left with the German Expressionist image of João rising from the sewer ducts in a cloud of smoke, as if rising from a coffin, resembling the shadowy image of Murnau’s creepy monster, with the past effectively merging into the present, with the early morning sound of blackbirds heard singing over the end credits.      

Recordações da Casa Amarela (João César Monteiro, 1989) entire film may be seen here with English subtitles, YouTube (1:57:20)

Vitalina Varela

Director Pedro Costa

Costa with lead actress Vitalina Varela

VITALINA VARELA           C+                  

Portugal  (124)  2019  d: Pedro Costa            Official site [Portugal]

Defiantly different, uncompromisingly bleak, existing in a world of its own creation, it represents a kind of dream slumber, drawn almost completely from the imagination, as there’s little here people can actually relate to in their own lives, instead feeling overly literary, much of it coming from the reading of letters, long speeches bearing little resemblance to life as we know it.  Comprised of extremely long drawn-out shots, people barely move in this film, instead they sit or stand and confess their innermost thoughts on camera, shrouded almost completely in darkness, shot almost exclusively at night, with barely any light creeping in.  This is the kind of film that draws plenty of praise from critics yet produces droves of walk-outs, as there is little else in the cinema tradition that compares, leaving viewers unnerved and confused, even a bit despondent, as they want to appreciate what they don’t particularly care for.  This kind of filmmaking is so out of the mainstream that audiences should be forewarned before entering the theater, as it’s not what you suspect, and can barely be called cinema at all, instead it more closely resembles a dialogue-driven living theater, a highly individualized staged expression, where theater audiences are much more likely to endure the kinds of extremes shown with this production.  While there is a small group of admirers who know who they are, this kind of heavily stylized filmmaking is for them, conceived with film festivals in mind, with absolutely no commercial prospects whatsoever.  While there may have been 100 viewers when the film began, it was closer to 60 or 70 who stayed to the end, and far fewer who actually liked it.  Existing in its own realm, utterly uncompromising, it comes with plenty of accolades, having won the Golden Leopard Grand Prize (1st place) at the Locarno Film Festival, while also winning a Best Actress Award for the actress bearing the same name as the film title.  If you’ve seen even one of Pedro Costa’s films, then you know what to expect, as the pace of the film is exasperatingly slow.  Except for a stunningly beautiful more traditional documentary entitled NE CHANGE RIEN (Change Nothing) (2009) that is shot completely in black and white, mostly in the studio with barely any trace of movement, capturing rehearsal sessions of actress/musical performer Jeanne Balibar, though revealed in fragments, never hearing an entire song, his other films are just plain difficult, most of them shot in the reconstructed realms of the now demolished Fontaínhas housing project, a home to largely immigrant communities located just outside Lisbon.    

Costa’s films follow a group of émigré’s originally from the rocky and volcanic Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony established to serve the African slave trade, who come to the mainland to find a better life but are relegated to segregated lives in the poorest slums, living in dilapidated shacks, eking out an existence of day labor jobs that leaves them ensnared in a web of neverending poverty.  While they may originally have dreams of transporting their families, those dreams die over time, as even their language is not really Portuguese or a Cape Verdian dialect, but seems of a different world, reflective of their lost identity that dissipates even further as the futility of their displaced lives becomes even more apparent.  The dominant impression is the staged artificiality of the style, maximizing the photogenic impact of every shot by the filmmaker himself or his longtime cinematographer Leonardo Simões, where shadowy figures emerge from a darkness, lifeless and bitterly deprived, appearing like ghosts, forced to confront their grim lives, yet a vividly animated life can be heard offscreen, whether it be babies crying or dogs barking, yet what’s captured onscreen is the utter stillness and solemnity of isolated lives who are now dreadfully alone, cut off from the rest of the world, downcast and spiritually depleted.  Expanded from her earlier brief appearance in HORSE MONEY (2014), the film is based on the true story of its protagonist, the entitled character Vitalina Varela, a non-professional actress who was born on Cape Verde Island, who arrives at the airport in Lisbon three days after her husband’s funeral.  In the opening few sequences, a slow funeral parade of weary bodies weaves its way past the walls of the cemetery into the narrow alleyways of their decrepit homes while the camera follows each one of the men as they open and close the metal doors of their crumbling concrete homes, one after another, shot from a dizzying array of angles, like a choreography of doors closing, yet the collective images suggest they are sealing themselves into tomb-like coffins where they will likely die in places just like this.  Arriving several days later, Vitalina is immediately told to go home, that there is nothing for her in Portugal, signs of warning that feel just a bit disingenuous, but may represent their own struggles with self-loathing, as the rundown neighborhood is hardly a picture of success.  Her view is that she waited 25 years to get here, so she might as well stay, clearing out the empty liquor bottles from her husband’s dingy home. 

What we quickly learn is that Vitalina is a strong-willed woman of extraordinary strength and resilience.  Flashback sequences reveal she married her husband Joaquim on the island, happily building their own home brick by brick before he ventured to Lisbon seeking work, returning briefly once, but then disappeared altogether, with Vitalina learning he was in prison at some point, never knowing why, or why he never fixed the leaky roof in this ramshackle home.  What follows is a period of mourning, reduced to lengthy monologues directed at her dead husband, whose spirit looms over the entire landscape, exploring the traces he left behind while remaining embittered for all the years he left her waiting alone without sending for her.  He’s not the only casualty here, however, with men reduced to scrounging through supermarket dumpsters or salvaging scraps of metal, it’s a neighborhood where people are devoid of all hope.  Even the local priest (Ventura, a Costa regular) has lost his faith, with Vitalina remembering him from the island, aware of the excruciatingly sad circumstances that gnaw at his ailing soul, having what’s left of a tiny church with no parishioners, where she is the only one who bothers to show up.  Shot in long, unbroken shots of her dimly lit face, revealing unfathomable depths of anguish and pain, ghosts of the past comingle with the shadowy world of the present, with Vitalina speaking in soliloquies, mostly seething with anger at her husband’s  philandering ways and broken promises, struggling with her own regrets, anxieties, and grief, looking around at this godforsaken place, wondering why he stayed, addressing him mournfully, “Here there is only bitterness.  Here we are nobody.”  An underlying message in Vitalina’s embattled relationship with her husband mirrors the complex relationship Portugal has with its former colony, leaving Cape Verdian immigrants displaced from either shore, tainted by the toxic effects of the mother country that never lives up to its promise as a homeland.  The film takes a nostalgic twist at the end, emerging from the cavernous darkness into the light of day, even under openly blue skies, recalling that time she and her husband built their house together in Cape Verde.  Even if much of the film is exasperating, feeling more like a slow death march, Costa has found an original method to imprint his vision into our subconscious, literally keeping the mood of his images in our heads long after the film is over.  Add to that the somber reality of the people who inhabit this human purgatory, where much of what we remember feels like an elegy or a requiem, providing an almost classical frame for this highly individualized and in many ways unpleasant journey.