Anxiety

From Portugal comes one of the most boring films I have ever seen in my whole life, a trilogy of three stories that are strung together with little connection. The first concerns a famous scientist who is trying to get his equally famous son to commit suicide because only in tragic death is true immortality achieved. The second story is about two men who linger endlessly (and I mean endlessly) about a prostitute they both love, who herself gives seven-hour monologues about the very nature of wallpaper (maybe I wasn't paying very close attention by that point). The third installment, about an unhappy woman in a peasant village who seeks out the help of a Greek hermitic witch and learns a lesson about dissatisfaction, is by far the most interesting tale and the only one that is actually a story as opposed to an acting exercise for melodramatic orators.

Manoel de Oliveira brings us a movie which is really a sequence of three stories loosely connected. The feature that binds these stories together is the fact that there is a dark tone in all of them and anxiety for different reasons. Be it the scientist afraid of getting old or the man fearful for the lover's welfare, there is a great portrait of suffering in many forms throughout the movie. In the end, I found several memorable moments all through the movie, but especially in the third story. The first story was also pretty interesting and the dialogues incredibly rich (as in most of Oliveira's movies). You can see the hand of the director in the movements of the camera, in the disposition of the actors and in the haunting mood of the narrative. 9/10