Costume Drama – Camera Coverage

a portuguesa

“Sempre a guerra. Agora já leva crianças pobres com ele. Para morrerem.“

[It’s always the war. Now he takes the children of the poor with him. To their deaths.]

The new Rita Azevedo Gomes film may seem meaningless to people outside Portugal, but as a Portuguese Cinema fan it is exciting to know that a director with such a small but critically acclaimed filmography just released new work. As a director, she has claimed her main influences, and this time she did not even needed to talk about them, as they are clear to anyone that goes through the film. She is working with an old-school film festival favourite actress, Ingrid Caven, and her performance is probably the highlight of the picture. Despite being an interesting homage to many visionary directors and containing great shot compositions (with the help of what is arguably the greatest Portuguese cinematographer, Acácio de Almeida) and a hypnotic soundtrack by José Mário Branco, The Portuguese Woman falls short in its delivery.

The film adapts a story from the 1924 novella by Robert Musil with the same name, with dialogues adapted by Agustina Bessa-Luís, a favourite of Manoel de Oliveira. It follows the story of a Portuguese woman (weird hun?) when she marries a German lord and lives in a castle in Germany while his husband is busy leading a war. It trails their romantic lives while he is in war, and what changes in their relationship when he comes back from it.

The ever beautiful Ingrid Caven in the beginning of the film.

Before I present the reasons I think why this film does not fall into the category of being great at all, let me first point out what holds the film up. There is a clear sense of cinematic conceptualization. A balance between the images and the sound and the music that is absolutely mesmerizing and engaging enough to create hope in the viewer for something great. The incredible care with framing reminds me of, of course, Oliveira’s work (as the director herself has mentioned the film as being a follow up tribute to Oliveira’s body of work), but mainly reminds me of Dreyer and, oddly enough, Peter Greenaway. There is an insistence in The Portuguese Woman of transforming beautiful roccoco painting archetypes into film, working almost like tableaux vivants. Rita works with the tools of camera movement and actor movement to lead us through these living paintings in a way that is diegetic enough to counterpart the hardship you will have in deconstructing the dialogues themselves (especially if you are a casual Portuguese citizen watching the film without subtitles). The soundtrack complements beautifully the rhythm of the scenes, even though that sometimes you feel the sound design of the film (especially regarding dialogue) to sound a little strange in the overall composition of the scenes (at least odd enough for me to notice).

The main problem with the film, and comparing it with some of Oliveira’s films for instance (and I know comparing is not the right way to analyse a new film), is that despite having some brilliant scenes, as a whole, it leaves the viewer feeling like the film is an exercise in futility. There are singular moments that are brilliant, and most of them are visual moments. I have no disdain for Agustina Bessa-Luís’ work (especially considering her words in Vale Abraão (1993) and her novels), but I truly feel that her script combined with the less-amazing and unoriginal scenes create a feeling of decadence that hasn’t the right to be in a tribute film. It is frustrating to deconstruct a film that is as beautiful and competent as this to only find banal and tired ideas that were already messed with a million times, and no overarching concept to hold its existence. And this is where the comparison with Peter Greenaway disappears, because there is no breaking of the narrative conventions in The Portuguese Woman that compensate for the extensive use of the aforementioned indulgent filmmaking decisions. I know that the screenplay is supposed to sound theatrical and poetic (just as it was in, again, Vale Abraão or Francisca (1981) ), but there is something in this particular picture that is profoundly distasteful and tiring.

An example of the mentioned idea of tableaux vivants.

It is a frustrating film for the potential it had to be great. The faces, the costumes, the voices, the colours, all of the small elements are meticulously chosen to compose every scene. The presence of Ingrid Caven brings a mesmerizing element of a Greek Chorus-like nature to the film, another ingredient added to what could have been a great cinematic work. The themes of womanhood, lethargy and class-relations are there though, even if disappointing in their scope. The lighting is great and magnetic. The music – enchanting. Even Bessa-Luís’ words are beautiful, but feel misplaced, and even misspoken at times. The film itself… it really has nothing new to say, and while it is presenting nothing new, and in spite of its cinematic beauty and being a noticeable tribute, it is remarkably unsatisfying and inconsequential.

5 out of 10

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

the favourite 1

“I must take control of my circumstance. I’m on my side, always. As it turns out I’m capable of much unpleasantness.”

Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek director that has first gathered international attention in the big film festivals with Dogtooth (2009) and has since then gradually gained public attention. Despite the many quirks and particularities of his previous projects, one of the big changes going into The Favourite is that it is the first film in which he worked not having written the screenplay with his associate Efthymis Filippou. This will be a big shift of style and pace from the unusually paced dialogues characteristic of his previous films. Despite this significant transformation in the dialogue, visually Lanthimos is working with some of the most unusual camera placing and most dynamic camera movement in all of his filmography, this being even more noticeable if we consider that The Favourite is at its heart a British costume drama.

This film revolves around the somewhat unknown historical figure of Queen Anne, and plays with the relationships between her majesty, her main advisor Lady Sarah Churchill and the newcomer servant Abigail. The whole piece revolves around the power struggle between these three characters in a way that has been compared to All About Eve (1950), being that it mainly focuses on the scuffle between Lady Sarah and Abigail for the Queen’s attention, love and their privileged position in royal affairs. If we try to deconstruct the film we will quickly realize that beneath all of the witty, sharp and corrosive dialogue there are layers upon layers of different motivations that lead our characters through this love triangle.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember whether you’ve loaded a pellet or not.”

What we gather from The Favourite is actually a really kaleidoscopic combination of themes in a story that could be dismissed as mostly politics. In the background we have the grand scale of the war with the French and in the forefront we have all the personal intrigue surrounding our three main characters. The dynamics between these two levels of politics are presented in a much more interesting and creative way than what is expected considering the film’s plot. But again, while this may seem like the core to the film (and is the core to many other films), The Favourite goes beyond and above, constructing all this political talk in a much more important and universal foundation that combines the matter of relationships with the matter of personal emancipation, all bound together by a sense of real tragedy and pathos revolving the central character of Queen Anne. This allows the viewer to be challenged and agitated, but especially helps in engaging the viewer, by never creating distance between both the film’s main ideas and its undertones, avoiding what could be either a wearisome and bland political allegory or an incomprehensible pretentious mess.

The dialogues and acting are witty and poignant and they never reduce the film into a predictable period drama. This is not necessarily due to the fact that they deal with unashamed and violent sexual language and cathartic situations, but instead in it allowing the viewer to engage with its complicated web of themes, something that in previous Lanthimos films was made really differently if not even in a slightly faultier way. The presence of the absurd, particularly the visual absurd, is still a big part of The Favourite, even if it takes a smaller and different role than in films like The Lobster (2015). As mentioned before, the camera is frenetic in The Favourite.

Despite some critics making visual comparisons with films like Barry Lyndon (1975) or The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) (and rightly so to some extent), Lanthimos’ take on the period drama ditches the expected formality of the genre. The camera is on the ground, on the corner of the room, by the window, it follows the corridors at the oddest angles. This combined with the heavy use of the fisheye lens give the film an edge that elevates the already combination of the oblique motley of themes in the picture, giving it a sense of a nightmare, a weird historical hallucination that seems to play on your subconscious. All of this put together with a truly eclectic soundtrack that goes from the expected baroque music of the time, to deeply sentimental slower paced string tunes, descending gradually into being experimental and dissonant, creates a dynamic that accompanies the visual queues of the film in a no-less than brilliant way.

An example of the use of fisheye lens and the odd camera placement in what could otherwise been a regular scene in court.

Complete with what is probably Olivia Colman’s best performance, together with the work of an incredible supporting cast, The Favourite is the most well-rounded of Lanthimos’ film. This sense of completion and unity does not mean that it is a linear and simple film, and not being a straightforward film does not mean that it is not accessible to pretty much anyone. The themes and subjects I mentioned are just a personal selection, but things like the exploration of the gender roles, that the film could be a possible exercise of pastiche and parody, or the viable but more complex psychoanalytical readings of The Favourite are all ideas that are easily interrogated by anyone that watches it. It is one of my favourite films of 2018 and I would say it is up there with The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) for Yorgos Lanthimos’ best.

8 out of 10

Tag: Costume Drama

A Portuguesa (2019)