It’s the Earth, not the Moon – Gonçalo Tocha

It’s the Earth, not the Moon (É na Terra, não é na Lua) (Gonçalo Tocha – Portugal) 185 minutes

Gonçalo Tocha and his sound engineer Didio Pestana arrive in Corvo, the smallest island of the Azores, 6 km by 4, population 440, with the intention of filming ‘everything we can, we will try to be everywhere at the same time and not miss a thing…we will try to meet everyone, to film every face, every service, every house, every street, every workplace, every corner of the island, every tree, every rock, every bird.’ The French sailor who takes them to the island says ‘the Azores are crazy and on Corvo, they’re even crazier’ (someone else says during the film that other Azoreans consider Corvo to be backward), but there is little evidence of any egregious eccentricity. If anything, Tocha’s film presents the island as such an ordinary society cast in extraordinary surroundings that at times you begin to question his motivation for making a documentary in such minute detail. We should be glad he did as It’s the Earth, not the Moon is one of the finest observational documentaries in recent years, an absorbing portrait of everyday life. Its punishing length and austere style (there are no captions and few recourses to voiceover) has led some to call it a ‘micro-epic’; there will be some for whom it is the hardest of films to watch, others will find it the easiest.

Tocha eschews anything that might give a noticeable timeline to proceedings and it is not always obvious the filming takes place over several visits over the course of a few years from 2007 to 2011. The film’s 14 chapters are interspersed with scenes of an elderly islander Inês Inêz knitting Tocha an old-fashioned whaler’s bonnet. This is one of several instances of manual labour documented in the film – and one that Inêz regrets is about to die out as the younger generation have no interest in it – others include fishing, slaughtering pigs, cattle-herding, Inêz’s husband crafting wooden bolt locks. Some of these crafts are more or less obsolete, now being processed on an industrial scale. It’s a wry avowal of artifice that carries (possibly unintentional) echoes of Robert Flaherty reintroducing the defunct basking-shark fishing to the Aran Islands to include in Man of Aran.

It’s the Earth, not the Moon has this wryness throughout. Tocha is almost always off-screen but is regularly addressed by the islanders, and his presence informs the action. The lightness of tone reminds you of Miguel Gomes’ wonderful Our Beloved Month of August. We meet members of a theatre troupe set up by Americans that has for some reason stopped off in Corvo, a German music teacher who wanted to get as far from home as possible without leaving Europe, the Portuguese Monarchist Party – marginal nationwide but a local force on Corvo – and, finally, a group of British birdwatchers. Tocha quickly gives up on his encyclopaedic intent but there is still an obsessive attention to the details of life on this tiny island. It is as if Tocha is providing his own canon for Corvo, which has little or no written documentation existing from its five centuries of human habitation. Until the last thirty years, the island was cut off even from other islands in the archipelago and it was only the arrival of an airstrip in 1983 that opened it up to the outside world. One of the few documents Tocha finds is shown him by a local archivist – a report from the Lisbon press in the early 1970s, which carried the headline ‘It’s the Earth, not the Moon’. It’s a suitably oblique title for a film that is gently exhaustive and which makes a small remote community a subject of the greatest importance. If Tocha’s film were a person, you would go out of your way to become its friend. A brilliant, mesmerising and lovingly warm film.

The Last Time I Saw Macao – João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata

The Last Time I Saw Macao (A Última Vez Que Vi Macau) (João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata – Portugal/France/Macao) 85 minutes

The Last Time I Saw Macao is one of those films that feature as in-between projects in directors’ filmographies – casually constructed works that have the initial appearance of being a placeholder but which reveal unexpected depths in a conception and execution liberated from commercial and creative exigencies. João Pedro Rodrigues, director of some excellent films in the expressive style currently prevalent in Portuguese art-house cinema, heads to Macao to co-direct a film with his regular art director João Rui Guerra da Mata, who grew up in the former Portuguese colony off the coast of southern China.

Macao was the last colony Portugal relinquished, surrendering it up to China in 1999, after a leasehold agreement similar to the British arrangement in Hong Kong. It has, over the past three or four decades, become the gambling (and prostitution) capital of China. In Rodrigues and da Mata’s Markerian travelogue, it is a hellish locus of vice and danger. The narrator, who goes by the name da Mata, returns to Macao, after three decades away, answering an anguished call from a friend, Candy, who seems to be in trouble. Once there, his search for his friend is related entirely via wild footage and the odd point-of-view shot, with all the dialogue off-camera.

Whereas Portugal’s former African colonies in Miguel Gomes’ Tabu are viewed as a paradise irrevocably lost, Macao in this film is a place that is now impossibly alien, even for someone who grew up there. This fits in with the reality of Macao, one of those post-colonial territories, like the Philippines and Vietnam, to have unsentimentally shed the influence of the former colonial power. English, just over a decade on from the handover, has largely supplanted the still-official Portuguese as a second language, something that is often apparent in the film’s many static shots of walls and signposts. That decline may be stemmed somewhat by a new influx of Portuguese fleeing the homeland’s economic crisis, but the Macao of the film is a colonial anomaly fading into history, the old Portuguese architecture and the distinctive black and white calçada portuguesa paving being the only legacies of the past likely to last.

A major reference in the film is Nicholas Ray and Josef von Sternberg’s 1952 adventure flick Macao, starring Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. The fact that this is all a Portuguese film can dredge up about a former colony is a bit desolate but Rodrigues and da Mata’s film plays on the exoticism of that half-forgotten half-classic in a clever way. It’s not unlike the references to Vertigo in Marker’s Sans soleil, and the use of improbably bleachy low-resolution video in The Last Time I Saw Macao is also reminiscent of the great French film essayist. The Last Time I Saw Macao may not give you the greatest sense of place, and it is unfailingly orientalist in its portrayal of the Chinese natives, but as far as onscreen memoirs go, the film is enticing and is a fresh take on a hoary old adventure trope.

La cage d'orée – Ruben Alves

La cage d’orée (Ruben Alves – France) 90 minutes

France’s Portuguese community – one million strong – is one of the country’s most unassuming success stories of integration. Most arrived in the post-war years, fleeing the underdeveloped economy, and often repression, of Salazar's Estado Novo, and made a number of trades their own, notably construction, painting and decorating and, most of all, the position of concierge, the superintendant of Parisian residential buildings. Facing less severe discrimination than Arab or African immigrants, the Franco-Portuguese have done well. Unlike other European immigrant groups in France though, such as the Spanish, the Poles and the Italians, the Portuguese have remained steadfastly connected to the old country. Many second-generation Portuguese are bilingual and will always choose the Selecçao over France, were the two to meet in a major football match (as they often do). Ruben Alves’ comedy La cage d’orée is a long-overdue portrayal of a community that has until now been largely ignored by French cinema.

The Ribeiro family live in the concierge lodge of a bourgeois building in Paris’ wealthy 16th arrondissement; mother Maria (Rita Blanco) takes care of the residents’ every need while José (Joaquim de Almeida) is a construction-site foreman. Son Carlos (Jean-Pierre Martins) is still at school while Paula (Barbara Cabrita) has started seeing the son of her father’s boss. José one day learns he has inherited a vineyard in the Douro valley from a long-estranged brother on condition that he go live there to oversee it. When word gets out that the Ribeiros are planning to leave, the building’s residents and José’s boss snap into action to prevent it by whatever means necessary.

La cage d’orée (the gilded cage) is a pretty unsophisticated comedy and is loaded to the point of cliche with all the familiar trappings of Portuguese life – the virgin of Fatima, pastéis de nata, fado (with Amália Rodrigues to the fore, of course), bacalhau à bras, the music of Rodrigo Leão (who contributed the soundtrack, much of it recycled), Port, Super Bock, and so on. The sporting idol of the Franco-Portuguese, PSG’s record scorer Pauleta even makes a goofy guest appearance. The central conceit is a bit flawed as, though it might be funny to a French audience, from the point of view of a neutral observer trying to prevent an immigrant from returning home has a touch of cruelty to it that sits uncomfortably with gentle comedy.

Nonetheless Alves’ film has some surprisingly sharp insights into the immigrant experience, particularly the tension between the yearning for the homeland and the commitments of life in the new country. It also movingly throws into relief the inferiority complex of the Portuguese vis-à-vis their French hosts (never mind that Portuguese culture and society are every bit as rich as those of France). It’s none too complicated and has the air of TV comedy about it but La cage d’orée is a pleasant portrait of a quietly proud immigrant community and it is nice to see the stone-faced Joaquim de Almeida get a go at comedy, being far more used to playing minor Latino tough guys in Hollywood movies.

My Afternoon Viewing

I went to see Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl today, the latest film by the 100-year-old veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (and his third film in as many years). It's an adaptation of a short story by Eça de Queiroz, updated to the present day but Oliveira doesn't change much in the way of the social relations of 19th-century Lisbon. The etiquette of introductions, marriage requests and bourgeois townhouse gatherings are still there as is the unthinking cruelty of intransigent relations (in this case the uncle who sacks and disowns his accountant nephew because of his intention to marry the blonde of the title). It's ever so anachronistic but its ancient, retrograde elegance works, it even reminds one of Lisbon and its curious airs of the past, its creaking electricós and elevadors, its rent-controlled maze of small city-centre haberdashers, locksmiths and bookshops and its sleepy sense of dignified torpor. Though based on a story written by Quieroz its doomed clerk reminds one more of the work of Fernando Pessoa - both writers are referenced in the film - and there's one line uttered that is pure Pessoa: 'Businesses don't like sentimental accountants'. Manoel de Oliveira will be 101 in December and he's already got his next film, The Strange Case of Angelica in pre-production. There must be something in the water in Portugal.

For Former Fascist Dictators Please Press One...

Portugal is the latest country to hold a TV straw-poll for its greatest national of all time, and the Portuguese plumped for former fascist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who had a 36-year innings ruling the Lusitanian republic with an iron fist (though he was somehow persuaded for the last two years of his life, following a stroke, that he was still ruling the country from his bed). 160,000 viewers took part and, according to The Guardian, the old fascist took 41% of the vote though, as one comment on their blog puts it 'this only shows that Portuguese fascists love to make phone calls to stupid TV shows.. Eurovision is coming folks ;)'. Couldn't have put it better myself. Oh, for the glory days of Portugal. Salazar's ideological rival, Communist leader, Alvaro Cunhal, came second while third was the more middle-of-the-road diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a sort of Portuguese Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg, who directed thousands of German Jews to safety via Portugal, against the orders of Salazar himself. I suppose that this poll doesn't really show anything at all, then. Except maybe that fascists have better telecommunication packages.