Perhaps the most enjoyable Oliveira film I've watched so far also proved to be the most frustrating experience (through no fault of the genial Portuguese director, whom I saw at the 2004 Venice Film Festival): unfortunately, the copy shown on late-night Italian TV was of an atrocious quality – with intermittent picture loss, rampant pixellation and considerable stretches where ...
The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless conversation was dramatically and suddenly terminated.
In 1992 Oliveira made O Dia do Desespero, which deals with the last days and ******* of Romantic novelist Camilo Castelo Branco and is based largely on the writer's letters. Most of it was filmed in the house where Castelo Branco in fact committed *******. The film opens, midway through the credits, with a 50-second static shot of a pen-and-ink portrait of the writer. Other por...