Come and Go (Vai e Vem)
Directed by César Monteiro.
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.
Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Fax: (617) 496-6750
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