Director: Eugène Green
Screenplay: Eugène Green
Cast: Carloto Cotta as Fernando
Pessoa / Alváro de Campos; Manuel Mozos as Moitinho de Almeida; Diogo Dória as
Ministro da Saúde; Alexandre Pieroni Calado as Mourinho; Ricardo Gross as Padre
Marinheiro / Bicha da Horta; Mia Tomé as Modelo; Eugène Green as Pintor
Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs
A short one, not to be called a
short film but a "mini-film" by Eugène
Green, an American born French
director whose work I wish was more readily available and seen. Green is an idiosyncratic auteur, but in
this day and age you can split a few of them off, not all of them, into two categories
- those who can get films or even a Netflix/Amazon Prime series in the current
day, and those who are still thankfully productive but whose work exists in
film festivals and/or their home lands rather than available for a country like
the United Kingdom. Green is definitely in the later camp, heavily indebted
to Robert Bresson, but if he did a
Nicolas Winding Refn and made a crime TV series I'd be compelled to witness it
just to wonder how he would go about making one.
That's definitely a joke to
consider seriously as the only conflict I have ever seen in one of his films is
in Le Monde vivant (2003), a reinterpretation
of fairy tales where the brave knight wore jeans, his trusted lion was played
by a dog, where he rode a motorbike and the tropes of fairy tales were retold
in a matter-of-fact realism. (Though Green,
in the one overt piece of conflict, still had a confrontation with a giant see
only from the furry shins down). Green's
also neither as nihilistic as many directors and openly spiritual to the point
of religious; not the Kevin Sobo way
mind, but the introspective one who has clearly read the Bible and religious
texts; one with a light contemplation of what those ideas actually are meant to
be. (In this case, he even plays off the divide between Jesuits and Jansenism as
ideologically apposed sects of Christianity for a really esoteric joke). He can
be humorous and light-hearted, yet with his very unconventional style and numerous
high art references, Green's a tricky
one for some to "get", but he never comes off as pretentious or
elitist, too softly spoken in his films and warm for this accusation to stick.
The trademark is that, inspired
by Bresson, his acting from actors is
very minimalistic, though not as extreme as, say, Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle
Huillet who practically minimalized acting to the point of non-actors
reading off texts in still shots in a film like Workers, Peasants (2001) against woodland trees. The only film to
get a British theatrical release, A Portuguese
Nun (2009), was testament to this through How Fernando... does take a huge risk when, for a considerable
chunk of its mere twenty six or so minutes, it devotes itself to its opening
credits, still scenes of the Portuguese location to a song of existential
emotional angst that is beautiful.
After this, the film gets a bit
more idiosyncratic; Fernando Pessoa, played by Carloto Cotta who has already making a name for himself playing the
simple child like footballer of Diamantino
(2018), is a real poet of considerable high regard in his homeland but, as
transpires here when a merchant desiring to import a Coca Cola stand-in to Portugal
and have him write an advertising slogan for it, did also desire to go into
business for financial success. In fact, the story this mini-film uses is real:
slightly different, Pessoa did write a
slogan for Coca-Cola in 1928, "First, it is strange. Then it gets into
you", only for Coca-Cola to be banned by the Portuguese authorities, and
Coca-Cola was banned in the country until 1977.
Fernando here, by way of a
doppelganger based on one of his real life heteronyms, does come up with the
perfect ad caption - "First you will be surprised, then you will be
possessed" - but that just helps the subsequent banning of the drink by
government officials. On one hand, as this is where Fernando himself realises
he has saved Portugal, this could all come off as a cheap swipe at American
consumerism. What complicates it is twofold. First, the government officials
are clearly played for comedic effect - they literally consider the possession
literal, so they hire a Jesuit priest to exorcise a bottle, probably one of the
strangest versions of such a scene you will ever see. Even if Green is entirely against the "United-Statesian"
import, he's aware enough to prod at his own characters' absurdities at the
same time.
Complicating this further are the
references. There's the notion of the "encoberto", which Fernando is
referred to including by himself; the Portuguese king Don Sebastiao at the end of the 16th century disappeared during the
1578 Battle of Alcácer Quibir in northern Morocco, only to develop a
mythological status that he would come back to help Portugal at a time of need.
Fernando does so by pure accident, and whilst it's a good thing in the end,
probably the bigger concern in theme is when the merchant admits it was a bad
idea to try to mix poetry with commerce. Fernando Pessoa here learns that his
greater virtue is to stick to poetry rather than helping a drink he even thinks
tastes disgusting be sold for commerce. Even if the advertising text was
potent, and the poster itself is too, a cameo by Green himself as the artist, in context rather than appreciated as
art they're disposable and suppressed. The real Fernando Pessoa certainly wasn't known as an advertising slogan
writer, as one of his best known poems about a specific form of melancholy, The
Bell in My Town, where the past and the future are the same, is heard at the
beginning before the opening credits.
Altogether, a new Eugène Green work is always appreciated,
a director I wish was better known. Short enough to see repeatedly, the slogan
is apt for the entire feature itself, and having been able to watch the
mini-feature multiple times for the review, there's a lot of subtext that can
be found and dug up in such a simply told work. And again, cola exorcism is
something you don't see every day.
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