It’s Actual Life. No, It’s Drama. No, It’s Both (The New York Times)

By DENNIS LIM

JEAN-LUC GODARD once observed that every fictional film is a documentary of its actors. Jacques Rivette finessed the aphorism, proposing that every film is a documentary of its own making, not only a record for posterity of the people in it but also a window into the culture that produced it.

In a very literal sense, all films have documentary aspects: once the camera is turned on, whatever is captured, no matter how staged, contains a trace of reality, an element of chance. The inverse is true as well: no documentary, whatever its claims to objective reportage, is ever devoid of manipulation, since a controlling hand is evident in even the most routine matters of camera placement and shot selection.

While these are truisms, obvious enough to anyone who has given these issues more than passing consideration, they have long been easy to forget in a film culture that conditions us to think of fiction and documentary as distinct forms. One of the most striking developments in recent world cinema is the emergence of films that resist precisely those categories, that could be said to blur or thwart or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead a productive liminal zone in between.

One such film, “Our Beloved Month of August,” by the director Miguel Gomes, is at once a musical, a travelogue, a quasi-incestuous family melodrama, an ethnographic portrait of Portuguese folk traditions and an account of its own chaotic production. As he tells it, Mr. Gomes ventured into rural central Portugal a few years ago to make a fictional film against the backdrop of the region’s summer music festivals.

When the shoot ran into trouble, he and his crew began to document the people and places around them, as well as their own difficulties. (Mr. Gomes appears in the film, and his brick of a screenplay is deployed as a sight gag.) The finished film, which runs from Sept. 3 through 11 at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan as part of a Gomes retrospective, is not just unclassifiable, but also unstable from moment to moment: a documentary about the creation of a fiction, which overtakes the proceedings at points only to recede again.

Mr. Gomes breaks down categories in the service of an expansive, kaleidoscopic experience. But hybrid works can also occupy the minimalist end of the spectrum — as with “The Anchorage,” a film by C. W. Winter and Anders Edstrom, which opens Sept. 17, also at Anthology.

Pairing textured cinematography with intricate sound design, it observes a few days in the life of a middle-aged woman on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago. She walks in the woods and swims in the sea; her daughter visits; a hunter passes by; the weather changes. The woman is played by Ulla Edstrom, Mr. Edstrom’s mother and a part-time resident of that Baltic island. Alert to everyday moments and the subtleties of the natural world, “The Anchorage” is an immersive depiction of a solitary, self-sufficient life, one that the actor to an extent shares with her character.

Cinephiles are by now accustomed to this kind of categorical confusion. The well-regarded Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, the subject of a recent DVD boxed set by the Criterion Collection, has spent years working in the Lisbon slum of Fontainhas, collaborating with its residents on films that are contemplative, highly stylized reflections of their actual lives.

Another festival regular, Ulrich Seidl of Austria, makes even more provocative use of hybrid forms. His unflinching documentaries, like “Animal Love,” about obsessive pet owners, incorporate staged scenes; his equally discomfiting fictional films use both nonprofessional actors and pungently real locations, which in his latest film, “Import/Export,” include an Internet-pornography sweatshop and a geriatric ward.

The tendency to mingle fiction and nonfiction can also be seen among emerging filmmakers. Pedro González-Rubio’s “Alamar,” a modest art-house hit this summer, is a sensuous record of an idyllic father-son fishing trip in the Mexican Caribbean: the stars are a real-life father and son, and the trip was conceived for the purpose of the film. Oscar Ruiz Navia’s “Crab Trap” is an atmospheric story of a drifter in a coastal Colombian village, invested less in narrative progression than in exploring a physical and psychological landscape. (It will be shown at the Latinbeat series at the Walter Reade Theater next month.)

In “You Are All Captains,” a debut feature shown at Cannes this year, the French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe uses his own experience teaching filmmaking to children in Tangiers, Morocco, to spark a playful rumination on the creative process and his outsider status.

These films are too disparate to amount to a movement, and it’s worth nothing that the underlying impulse is hardly new. The attraction to the real is hard-wired into a medium that began when the Lumière brothers took their camera out into the thick of daily life to make their “actuality films,” of a train entering a station or of workers leaving a factory.

In the 1940s, D. W. Griffith, lamenting the airlessness of studio-bound films, declared, “What’s missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” It was an urge to confront reality that inspired Italy’s postwar neo-realists and the cinéma-vérité pioneers of the 1960s.

What’s striking about the present moment is just how widespread the taste for reality is among the major figures in world cinema, from the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, who is known for a kind of hall-of-mirrors neo-realism, to the recent Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul of Thailand, whose films combine surrealism and documentary realism.

Jia Zhangke, the leading Chinese filmmaker of his generation, has worked in fiction and nonfiction, sometimes combining the two and invariably using the metaphorically charged spaces of the new China as ready-made film sets.

For the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, whose four features have all screened at Cannes, fictional frameworks are mere pretexts to shoot with specific people in specific places: the pampas, the jungles, the frozen wilds of Tierra del Fuego. His first film, “La Libertad” (2000), is based on months of observing a lone woodcutter’s daily routine.

The critic Robert Koehler, writing in Cinema Scope magazine, used the phrase “the cinema of in-betweenness” to describe films like “The Anchorage.” Many of these new hybrid films are in line with the artistic sensibility that the writer David Shields outlined in his recent polemic, “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,” which deals mainly with literature but also invokes Werner Herzog, the poet laureate of the subjective documentary, and Sacha Baron Cohen, whose spasms of prankster performance art double as documentaries of bigotry.

The notion of a doc-fiction hybrid is so vast that it can encompass any number of permutations. But the most rewarding hybrid films are validations of the creative uncertainty principle. They bespeak if not a love of the world then at least a curiosity about it. They understand that the introduction of fact does not necessarily make fiction more real but possibly more strange. Inventing impure forms to match impure content, they can open up subtly new ways of seeing and thinking about movies. Most of all, they are expressions of what Mr. Alonso surely recognized when he titled his groundbreaking film “La Libertad”: freedom.

"Aquel querido mes de agosto", de Miguel Gomes (crítica)

Link (Clarín)

Venecia: "I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You", de Marcelo Gomes y Karim Ainouz (Variety review)

Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo

(Brazil) A Rec Produtores, Daniela Capelato, Gullane, Petrobras presentation of a Rec Produtores Associados, Daniela Capelato, Gullane Filmes, Doc Filmes, Maquina Producoes production. (International sales: Gullane Filmes, Sao Paulo.) Produced by Joao Vieira Jr., Daniela Capelato. Executive producers, Livia de Melo, Nara Aragao. Co-producers, Caio Gullane, Fabiano Gullane, Ofir Figueiredo, Chico Ribeiro. Directed, written by Marcelo Gomes, Karim Ainouz.

With: Irandhir Santos.

By JAY WEISSBERG

Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent, "I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You" is a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Co-helmers Marcelo Gomes and Karim Ainouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching, this is perfect fest fare that could hit arthouse screens, provided critical support is strong.

If the title sounds long-winded and possibly even corny, auds will justifiably rally to its defense after viewing the film. It's shot from the perspective of geologist Jose Renato (Irandhir Santos), who's on a work trip through the semi-arid Sertao region, analyzing tectonics for a canal project that will cut through the area and displace thousands of inhabitants. Speaking out loud as he drives through the dry, barren landscape, he names geological formations and occasionally slips into more personal territory.

Gradually, as he speaks to the air in a one-sided conversation with the wife he misses, it becomes clear that she's just left him. The professional aspect of the trip turns increasingly onerous as Jose Renato's thoughts are crowded with a raw sense of loss and mounting desperation. Unable to bear the loneliness of the empty terrain, he ventures to a town, hooking up with some prostitutes as he progresses through various stages of loss, eventually coming to a calmer place.

Those expecting something similar to Ainouz's "Suely in the Sky" or "Madame Sata" will be very surprised by the new pic's form and content, though the road theme does have parallels with Gomes' "Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures." Here, the process of grief and its visual accompaniment in the wide open landscape smoothly develop from stark loneliness to a gradual connection with people, becoming genuinely cathartic as the protag discovers that his metaphorical tunnel really does have a light at the end.

When Jose Renato first starts meeting prostitutes, they're seen generally in fixed-camera portraits, but then he trains his lens on Patricia, who speaks of her dream of a "leisure life." By including this one scene, the helmers remind the viewer that Patricia, and all the others glimpsed in stasis, are not mere objects to be glimpsed and forgotten but real people. While the main character is never seen, the film movingly achieves its goal of being both a view through his eyes and a conduit into his mind.

The mix of formats, including Super 8 and DV, give the film the feel of a personal travelogue, which of course it is, but no homemovie has ever been so expertly edited. At times, it's as if the helmers have put together a scrapbook of the mind, with images and thoughts moving on a similar track, all accompanied by a selection of music whose style and lyrics are completely in sync with the emotional arc.

Camera (color, Super 8, DV, High 8-to-DCP), Heloisa Passos; editor, Karen Harley; music, Chambaril; sound (Dolby Digital), Waldir Xavier, Ricardo Cutz; line producers, Juliana Carapeba, Germana Pereira; associate producers, Link Digital, Karen Harley. Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Horizons), Sept. 4, 2009. (Also in Rio de Janeiro Film Festival -- competing.) Running time: 71 MIN.

BAFICI: Entrevista a Miguel Gomes

Link (Clarín)

Casi un extracto de una entrevista que le hice a Miguel en Viena. En algún momento la publicaré, en algún lado, completa.

The Rules of the Game: A Conversation with Miguel Gomes (Cinema Scope)

By Mark Peranson

In Arganil, a poor and sparsely populated mountainous region known as “the heart of Portugal,” the beloved month of August is abuzz with natives, tourists, and drunken activity, with fireworks, boar hunting, religious celebrations, roller hockey, alien abduction, and, if you’re part of Portuguese film critic-turned-filmmaker Miguel Gomes’ intimate circle of friends, filmmaking. Gomes set off north from Lisbon, brick-sized script in tow, to make a somewhat conventional film about the affective relationship between father, daughter, and cousin, all three members of a barnstorming middle-of-the-road Portuguese pop band called Estrelas do Alva—although he didn’t have a cast, nor enough money to make the film as intended. But instead of packing up, Gomes and his skeleton crew decided to document the people and the celebrations they saw around them, in the course of their adventures discovering the liveliness of their country, and, whilst playing quoits, a few fresh faces that in an alternate universe could easily become superstars.

In his second feature-length film, with the greatest of ease, Gomes moulds documentary into fiction and vice versa, bridging scenes together by the grace of their own movement and popular Portuguese melodies. In the process, traditional boundaries are obliterated, then rebuilt in a way that defies simplistic logic—a pattern seen in his debut feature, the remarkably obscurantist The Face You Deserve (2004), a kind of claustrophobic version of Rivette by way of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)and late Godard, but that’s only the second half. Organically constructed and impressively humble, Our Beloved Month of August shows the fantastic, mythic elements present in everyday life, and the mundane realities present in filmmaking, presenting the two as links in a neverending chain of dominoes—and goddamned if, against all odds, it doesn’t all come together. But such is life, connections magically folding and unfolding, in a series of invisibly refereed games.

And such is Gomes’ magical oeuvre of, as he has often labeled them, “musical comedies”—along with two features, he has directed six shorts, all of which screened this year at the Viennale (further complete retrospectives will surely follow, Buenos Aires being confirmed as the next). Their oblique subjects range from a coming-of-age ménage a trois (Meanwhile, 1999), a holiday tale of children and their toys that in 1/6th of the time puts Arnaud Desplechin to shame (A Christmas Inventory, 2000), and St. Francis of Assisi (Canticle of All Creatures, 2006). Then there’s a black-and-white whatsit wherein adults claim they are children, and, when they open their mouths, yawp drone-like gibberish (Kalkitos, 2002). For 19 excruciating minutes. In Vienna, a Q & A after a shorts program began with interrogator Olaf Möller challenging: “What the fuck is Kalkitos?” It’s a question not out of line, and a question that might be asked of pretty much every one of Gomes’ films. The answer, but of course, is: “A remake of The Wizard of Oz (1939).”

A Gomes film is likely to evoke numerous cinematic comparisons, but also comprises wild shifts in tone, a characteristic traceable to a keen yet impatient intelligence. All come together in Our Beloved Month of August, one of the year’s best films and an unlikely—to say the least—Oscar nominee from Portugal. Nashville (1975) without its sense of world-historical importance, it’s a film about the creative process possessed inherently by all people on this planet, and only betrays its true nature on multiple viewings. Halfway in, there’s a scene with two nonprofessional actors chatting, surreptitiously recorded by Gomes. One of them complains that the director keeps changing the lines on him, that he’s nervous, and why not. Minutes later, they walk through the old town and the other, who we first met performing karaoke but who becomes the band’s drummer in the second half, is whistling a throwaway tune, which, about half an hour later, is performed for the first time by Estrelas do Alva. It’s the title track, at first just another song among many songs, and only becomes catchy when performed by the full band, vocals and all. This small recognition hints to the ways that in Our Beloved Month of August direction, screenwriting, and editing have molded as one in a magical place somewhere over the rainbow.

Cinema Scope: So what the fuck is The Face You Deserve?

Gomes: Is that a real question?

Scope: Yeah, that’s a real question. Why did you want to make this movie?

Gomes: Let me try to remember. Well, I wanted to do a film about this, you know, crisis of being 30. In Portuguese, there is this sentence that goes, “Until 30 you have the face that God gives you, then after you have the face you deserve.” And so I had this idea to create a character that at a certain point just could not continue. So he was interacting with other people, and then he gets abandoned, and comes down with the measles. And then the film turns into Snow White, so he has to return to his childhood and try to…well, he becomes like a film director, he has to make a film to save himself.

Scope: I told you before it took me two weeks to figure out what the film was about, and I concluded that it was about filmmaking—even if all films are about filmmaking in some way, this one is in particular. But my interpretation is not just that he acts as a director, but the moral of the film—as fairy tales have lessons—speaks to the view that all the rules you know up to 30 you have to forget, you have to start again. And, in particular, regarding how films are made, how they have been made in the past. In The Face You Deserve—in all of your films, including the shorts—there’s an obvious preoccupation with rules, and, actually rules that are often completely absurd. Here the actors obey the rules, and they realize they are absurd by the end.

Gomes: Yes, the rules in my films may be a little bit ridiculous, but I also think that most rules in the world outside my films are also ridiculous. We are even, me and the world. But in this case, yes, I wanted to have this Oz world in the forest and the friends, who are like the seven dwarfs, and, yes, they are obsessed by rules. The film progresses until there is a moment where one of them breaks the rules, then they start to doubt them. When that happens, you’re fucked, and then the film must end. So the last sentence in this film is “Goodbye my friends,” which is a sentence you hear before when one character, Nicolau, buries grasshoppers in a little grave. So this, “Goodbye my friends,” is goodbye to the old rules, but it’s very sad, too.

Scope: In a general sense, though, were you also thinking about changing the old rules of narrative filmmaking, as a process a serious director must do once they’ve reached a certain level of understanding, or maturity?

Gomes: I think there are lots of films that I really like—we’ve talked about The Wizard of Oz, but there’s also Moonfleet (1955)…

Scope: Disney. And in The Face You Deserve you see a lot of Rivette.

Gomes: Yes, and Rivette is very obsessed with rules, and games. But that also comes, for instance, from the classical American cinema, where you can solve a problem with a bet, or just summon up destiny. For instance, I love American screwball comedies. In Bringing Up Baby (1938), the characters behave like children—it’s all games all the time. It’s very regressive.

Scope: Most, if not all, of the short films, are about children—or naïfs, like Saint Francis. Games and fairy tales have an appeal to children, obviously—adults don’t believe in fairy tales any more, or in magic…or, say, in The Wizard of Oz.

Gomes: I believe in those things, but I also think they are kind of ridiculous, so I guess my films have both of those things in there at the same time. They do strange and maybe silly stuff, like burying the grasshoppers…

Scope: They are all rituals, too, not just games, and maybe this is more the point in Our Beloved Month of August—to simply exist people need games, or rituals, or legends. Or a job. There are things society requires to stay together. And every filmmaker has to choose what part of society to concentrate on. You can’t have a believable film with people interacting unless there is something binding them together, even on the most basic level—language, for instance. Language is a rule-based system that can even be absurd, like in Kalkitos.

Gomes: I think the important thing is not rules, but people believing in the rules. There is a time where people believe in certain rules, then there’s another time when they don’t believe in them, but believe in another set of rules.

Scope: That’s what the first short is about.

Gomes: That’s a very bad film.

Scope: Technically, though, you just described a rite of passage film, which is what Meanwhile is.

Gomes: Adolescence is like no man’s land. You have childhood, when you believe in things, then in adolescence there is a moment, for instance, you understand that grown ups are sometimes full of shit and they tell lots of lies…

Scope: The moment you realize that God doesn’t exist.

Gomes: Yeah, sure, and then adolescence, and you start to accept other rules—you are forced to accept them, you need money to live…

Scope: In Our Beloved Month of August, there’s an awareness of the rules of fiction and documentary, and their absurdity, and the willingness to keep some and throw others out and not worry about the consequences.

Gomes: Maybe that’s why I’m now writing a script that has two parts, again. I never thought about these two-part things, maybe it has something to do with creating rules and then destroying the rules you created, imposing another set of rules, and seeing how the rules in the two parts are mixed, or clash, or something like that.

Scope: What rules did you have while making this movie?

Gomes: I had one golden rule. As we were invading this place, Arganil, so we should be in this film. Because we were demanding the locals to play characters, we had to do the same. And everything that was brought with us from Lisbon should be in the film. So every piece of equipment is in the film—the camera, the tripods—that was a rule.

Scope: Why was this so important to you?

Gomes: The film is a clash between cinema with this part of the country, so us and everything that was with us should appear. Normally there is behind the camera and in front of the camera, and this time I wanted to put everything in front of the camera, and even what’s in the middle should appear—which is the camera.

Scope: Some people don’t get this point, and think the appearance of the crew—and you—in the film is, well, self-indulgent.

Gomes: Yeah, they call me a “wannabe Fellini.” But I think it was only fair to do it. In this part of Portugal, they don’t have cinema, or theatre…but I think it’s a film about the common desire of making films.

Scope: For making films or making art in general? Is the guy who jumps off the bridge a filmmaker?

Gomes: This guy Paolo Miller is a simple character. But he’s always acting. He was completely drunk all the time, but he kept acting, almost until he passed out. I let him do his own mise en scène, and it’s the centre of the first part. In the first part I’m looking for people to play characters, and I couldn’t ask him to be a character in the second part because he’s already a kind of character in the first part. The other people give him roles, so in a way he’s bigger than life. And you can see he’s lying, he’s acting. So he concentrated his movement of the film in himself, which is why I chose not to ask him to return in the second part.

Scope: It’s easy to say that the difference between the two parts is that one is documentary and the other is fiction, but that’s not quite accurate. Maybe it’s this point, that in one part the actors are making the mise en scène, and in the other part you are. Is that accurate?

Gomes: Yeah. At least, I’d like it if people think of it in that way.

Scope: It’s not exactly true in one sense—when I was watching the second part again, I was looking at the camera style and trying to see if there was a noticeable difference in the way that scenes were shot…

Gomes: No, I tried not to. I even tried to prevent my cinematographer from putting equipment in the shots, but he snuck things in—you can still see them. But it could not exactly be the same because we knew what was going to happen most of the time. Anyway, some of the scenes with the most explicit mise en scène were in the first part, in the scenes with my producer, and the dominos…those Spaghetti Western scenes.

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Diario de la Viennale (Parte 11) Premio FIPRESCI

El Premio FIPRESCI del Festival de Cine de Viena es para "Aquele querido mes de agosto", de Miguel Gomes (Portugal). Dirán que es previsible, tras todo lo que escribí anteriormente celebrando la película. Pero no tanto, porque éramos cuatro en ese jurado. En una próxima entrada --mañana, seguramente-- les contaré un poco las intimidades de una larga votación, la más curiosa, extraña y apasionante que tuve en un jurado de la crítica en los once años (y otros tantos festivales, más o menos) que llevo participando en este tipo de competencias.

La justificación, que tuve que escribir en inglés para ser leída esta noche en la ceremonia, es así:

"With its intricate structure, which still manages a straightforward and sensitive approach to its characters -- whether real or fictional, or both at once -- Miguel Gomes' "Aquele querido mes de agosto" ("Our Beloved Month of August") brings to life a whole world -- a world of music, of passion, of romanticism and tragedy. It's a world which seems to be creating itself before our very eyes and, at the same time, seems to have existed forever. A world both magical and mundane. A world of songs, music and dance. A world as beautiful, sweet and sad as the month of August."

Diario de la Viennale (Parte 10) o Boceto de una introducción a un estudio sobre el cine de Miguel Gomes

A ver. Cómo logro explicarle a un crítico de cine inglés que vive en Sunderland porqué "Aquele querido mes de agosto" no es una película "extravagante y pretenciosa" sino que, por el contrario, es una película simple, humana, amable y generosa que, en el mejor de los casos, tiene una estructura lo suficientemente compleja como para que el asunto no nos caiga pegajoso.

La película de Gomes, que viene de tener un gran recibimiento en Cannes, no es de sencilla digestión para aquellos que no tienen una relación ambigüa --de amor/fastidio, cariño/paternalismo, comprensión/desinterés-- con ciertas formas de la cultura y los mitos populares. El filme de Gomes tiene, no sé, quince o veinte canciones populares del interior de Portugal. No les hablo de la música elegante y exportable del fado, sino de una especie de cumbia romántica, mezclada con adaptaciones de canciones melódicas --algunas traducidas del español, de Julio Iglesias sin ir más lejos-- que se la denomina allí "pimba" (algo así como la cumbia o el cuarteto en la Argentina, con similares ingredientes socioculturales) que sirve como marco narrativo, estético y temático del filme.

Aquí un ejemplo de la música que me refiero, con Tony Carreira, uno de los máximos exponentes del género en su vertiente romántica.

La música es parte de las fiestas populares que se realizan en el interior portugués durante el mes de agosto, que es cuando los emigrantes vuelven a visitar sus pueblos en plan vacaciones/reencuentro familiar. El filme de Gomes (en el centro de la foto, con su productor Luis Urbano y Lisa Persson, asistente de cámara) puede ser visto, en un principio, como un recorrido por esos pueblos, esas fiestas, esas músicas, y los curiosos personajes que los pueblan y que cuentan a cámara sus peculiares historias de amor, de locura y hasta de muerte.

Pero esta narración está enmarcada por otra, que la engloba. De entrada se nos dice que lo que estamos viendo es casi una sesión de cásting, el recorrido que hace un equipo de filmación por una zona buscando locaciones, personajes, historias, inspiración para una película. Es entonces que podemos tomar todo lo que pasa como una especie de "backstage" de una película o el making off de una preproducción. Y, de hecho, hasta el propio director y varios miembros del equipo técnico aparecen en escena, e inclusive muchos de los personajes del pueblo hacen mención al rodaje, se quejan de los cambios o piden aparecer en cámara, aunque muchas de estas escenas "documentales" tienen mucho aspecto de "armadas".

Gomes está supuestamente haciendo el cásting para una historia de ficción que no vemos, hasta que en un momento esa historia empieza a tomar forma y algunos personajes a los que habíamos visto antes empiezan a atravesar un curioso triángulo "romántico" (son una chica, su padre y su primo). No hay un corte hacia otro relato, sino un extraño traslado hacia el universo de la ficción que no termina de abandonar nunca el marco documental que la contiene y que sigue apareciendo, aunque en menor medida.

La película dura 150 minutos y la mayoría coincide --yo también-- que la parte "documental" es la que mejor funciona, que sus personajes son riquísimos (el viejo que habla con su esposa corrigiéndole detrás, el que vive tirándose al río borracho y haciéndose pelota los huesos, y así) y los momentos musicales/sociales están muy bien retratados (a excepción de uno en el que miran una película berreta, tipo las de Saladillo, que peca un poco de condescendiente/paternalista). Pero creo que el filme no sería lo complejo y completo que es sin la parte de ficción. Allí los recursos narrativos y estéticos se igualan a unos escenarios y a unos personajes que viven siempre a mitad del camino entre el realismo y la fantasía, la cotidianeidad del ser y la ilusión (festivalera, televisiva, musical, "Tinéllica") de transformarse en otra cosa, en ficción si se quiere.

El filme cierra con un ensayado debate de los miembros del equipo acerca de ciertos sonidos que captura Vasco Pimentel (el director de sonido) y que, según los demás, no están en el lugar. Lo que sigue es una charla acerca de lo que se ve y no se ve, lo que se escucha y lo que no, lo que el cine capta y lo que uno quiere/puede captar. Aquello de que el cine no es un espejo de la realidad sino uno de nosotros mismos es algo que bien podría ser una de las bases "filosóficas" del cine de Gomes, ex crítico del diario Público (algo así como el "Clarín" de Portugal) que un día se hartó de su trabajo ("¿Cómo podés todas las semanas escribir algo interesante sobre películas que no te importan nada?", me preguntaba cuando lo entrevisté...) y se dedicó al cine.

Tiene 36 años, cuatro cortos y "Aquele..." es su segundo largo después de "La cara que mereces", que hizo en 2004 y estrenó en 2005. Vi ese largo y dos de sus cortos, y no tengo dudas que "Agosto" es el filme en el que logra reunir todos sus variados intereses, que van desde los cuentos de hadas, las fantasías animadas, los musicales, la sexualidad adolescente y una levedad aparente que esconde personajes bastante oscuros, como el que protagoniza "La cara que mereces", un hombre que se enfrenta a su cumpleaños número 30 y tiene una relación de amor/odio con su infancia.

Aquel filme también pegaba una gran vuelta de tuerca a la media hora, pero no resultaba tan efectiva. Esa especie de musical depresivo del principio (la canción que lo abre es excelente, si alguien la consigue o la tiene, please, avise...) se transformaba en una versión actualizada y extravagante de "Blancanieves y los siete enanitos", pero el asunto perdía fuerza y ganaba en confusión con el correr de los minutos.

El corto que vi, "Entretanto", es excelente, y se centra en la relación entre una chica de look bastante andrógino y dos chicos con los que anda a la vez. La música también es aquí un elemento fuerte, lo mismo que un tipo de actuación bastante alejado del naturalismo. Dice Gomes que su mayor influencia portuguesa como cineasta es la de Joao César Monteiro y se nota. Hay más en él de esa locura desbordada del director de "Recordacoes da Casa Amarela" que de la sobriedad de Manoel de Oliveira (aunque se reconoce fan de "Francisca") o de la oscuridad de Pedro Costa.

De hecho, es uno de un grupito de cineastas y críticos portugueses fascinados por los cortometrajes del salteño Martín Mainoli, cuyo club de fans es mayor allí que en la Argentina. Si alguien vio alguna vez algún corto de Mainoli (caso clásico, "Kenny") podrá entender mejor lo que le interesa a Gomes, cuál es su manera de observar el mundo y de narrarlo.

La Viennale termina el miércoles y todavía no hemos tomado, el jurado de la crítica, nuestra decisión. Como queda claro aquí, lo mío es "voto cantado", aunque hay otros dos filmes en la selección (que me cuidé de casi nunca mencionar) que me interesan casi tanto como el de Gomes, y con el que no tienen nada que ver cinematográficamente.

¿Habrá música pimba en Sunderland? ¿Podremos hacer que Carlitos Tévez (quien, de hecho, se parece bastante a uno de los protagonistas de "Agosto") se corra unos kilómetros de Manchester y haga un show con su banda de cumbia villera por ahí a ver si el muchacho entiende?

Encontré esto en un sitio llamado "Flores de inverno" que me pareció interesante --un análisis de la película a modo de carta a su director-- y lo agregué aquí, a modo de posdata, en portugués. Se entiende...


"o seu filme podia ser uma história de amor. não é.
o seu filme podia ser uma digressão etnográfica. não é.
o seu filme podia ser um melodrama estival, com vista para serra. não é.
o seu filme podia ser um tese de doutoramento em cinema moderno. não é.
o seu filme podia ser uma indagação partilhada sobre o que é ser actor. não é.
o seu filme podia ser uma espécie de musical proto-pimba, castiço até mais não. não é.
o seu filme podia ser uma comédia inteligente, ligeiramente patusca e gozando com essa coisa que é a alma portuguesa, tal como visível no quotidiano banal. não é.
o seu filme podia ser um registo em 'huis clos', um 'jeu de massacre' emocional, em torno do triângulo/quadrilátero ficcional do filme (pai, filha, o primo e interesse amoroso daquela, a mãe e mulher ausente dos primeiros personagens). não é.
o seu filme não é nada disto 'per se'. e, no entanto, claro está, é tudo isto. só que é muito mais do que isto. no diálogo final, já o segmento ficcional acabou - acabou? - discute, na presença do núcleo duro da equipa de filmagem, com o seu director de som, queixando-se de que existem no material filmado 'sons que não estão lá'. o seu director responde-lhe que, e citamos de memória, que 'não lhe interessa nada o que está lá, para isso há uma data de outros tipos; ele vai e capta outra coisa, porque ele vai ao encontro do que lhe interessa escutar e captar. seja ou não tecnicamente possível.'
ao fim de duas horas e meia de filme, este é o único argumento de tese. sim, este filme é sobre o que está lá (o registo das festividades e do quotidiano de verão, numa vilazinha da beira interior, tempo de festas e romarias, mistura de rituais antigos e praxis modernas, regresso de emigrantes, sagrado e profano de mão dada, sempre ao som do cançonetismo popular ligeiro) e sobre o que não está lá (a grandeza humana que, maior do que qualquer ficção idealizada, se esconde em cada um de nós; os enredos implícitos; a humanidade em estado de graça, quando expôe toda a sua sublime e tocante paleta de emoções)."