Portugal 1978, 35mm, color, 116 min. Portuguese with English subtitles
For his feature debut Monteiro creatively borrowed from traditional Portuguese legends to craft a series of echoing, parallel tales of young couples desperately escaping cruel false fathers, each couple on the run across different regions of the country and during increasingly contemporary time periods. A lyrical and profoundly cinematographic allegory with a glisteningly sharp political edge, Paths traces a pattern of repressive authority across Portuguese history while also pointing, with cautious optimism, towards the steady presence of youthful resistance. With its stunning choreography of landscape and use of a poetic, associative structure to evoke the longue durée of mythical time, Paths anticipates Monteiro’s mid-career masterpiece Silvestre.
With Rita Durão, João César Monteiro, Joana Azevedo
Portugal 1998, 35mm, color, 150 min. Portuguese with English subtitles
Originally conceived as an integrated second part of a six-hour version of God’s Comedy, Monteiro’s fable of obscure crimes without punishment follows the comic and sexually explicit misadventures of João de Deus, again played with Buster Keaton-like gravity by Monteiro himself, as he finds fortune, love and spiritual redemption in unexpected places. A sumptuously beautiful film, God’s Wedding uses extreme wide-angle cinematography and a rich, naturalistic soundtrack punctuated with gorgeous musical interludes to create a wonderfully complex mise-en-scene that unfolds action in depth and delicate details of the image.
With Maria do Cormo, Ana Brandão, Reginaldo da Cruz
Portugal 2000, 35mm, color, 75 min. Portuguese with English subtitles
Monteiro moved far away from the visual opulence defined by his earlier films with his inspired adaptation of radical Swiss writer Robert Walser’s anti-fairy tale. Carefully restricting the image track, Monteiro maintains an almost totally black screen in order to focus instead on the voices of Snow White, the Prince, the Queen and the Hunter, engaged in an extended debate about love, free will and the events leading up to the fateful attempt on the maiden’s life. Despite its visual austerity, Snow White is haunted by the arresting images with which it begins – infamous black-and-white photographs of Walser lying dead in the snow after his heart attack outside a Swiss asylum at the age of seventy-eight, a strange realization of the “death of the author” so central to postmodern literary criticism.
With Maria de Madeiros, Teresa Madruga, Luís Miguel Cintra
Portugal 1981, 35mm, color, 118 min. Portuguese with English subtitles
A bewitching combinatory adaptation of the Bluebeard tale and a 15th century Portuguese fable of a damsel who disguises herself as a knight errant, Silvestre is both radically feminist and fascinated with the dark, primal logic of the paternal order. Monteiro’s earliest collaboration with producer Paulo Branco was among his first to receive international acclaim, with special attention given to Silvestre’s daring use of deliberate artifice – front-projected backgrounds, extended freeze frames, theatrical performances – to capture the fatalistic rhythm and dream logic of myth.
With João César Monteiro, Rita Pereira Marques, Joaquina Chicau
Portugal 2003, 35mm, color, 175 min. Portuguese with English subtitles
Driven by his struggle against the illness that would ultimately prove fatal, Monteiro fervently devoted himself to his deeply personal last work, a musically structured meditation on spirituality and desire in which he heroically cast himself in the lead role as an eccentric libertine drifting wide-eyed through a sun-drenched Lisbon. A consciously terminal film, Come and Go offers a poetic summation of Monteiro’s fascination with the body as the most irreverent and mysterious of temples, staging a series of playfully austere encounters between the visibly infirm and prematurely aged director and the women with whom he engages in erotic, linguistic and theological debates.
