Beyond The Clouds

tieman64

Manoel de Oliveira writes and directs "Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl", a slight but intermittently interesting romantic comedy. De Oliveira was a hundred years old when he directed the film. Many regard him as the oldest film director in the history of our planet.

"Eccentricities" opens on a train bound for Algarve, a ticket inspector hobbling away from camera as the train surges forward "beneath" him. This dual motion suggests stasis, a limbo in which our hero, Marcario, sits.

An attractive young man, Marcario strikes up a conversation with the passenger seated beside him. Through flashbacks we learn of Marcario's recent romantic crash-and-burn, a love affair in which he fell head over heels for the blonde haired girl living opposite his uncle's firm. Using window frames, paintings, arches and a series of immaculate compositions, Oliveira draws a line from Marcario's idealisation of the blonde girl to art and cinema. Love always springs from the visual imagination, is a polymorphous perversion more akin to a fetish, the blonde haired girl an idealised object Marcario worships from afar, but grows to detest as the distance between them closes. When the gap between fantasy and reality irrevocably crumbles, it is then comically revealed that the blonde haired girl is a creepy, deceptive thief. Marcario promptly grows furious and calls off the couple's planned marriage. But Marcario's fall into disillusionment, which Oliveira extends beyond romance to everyday life and labour, is his own fault (in a bit of meta-delusion, the film's character's applaud the text upon which they themselves are based). Though Marcario resents his uncle, he is equally pampered, narrow minded and bigoted.

7.9/10 - See Bresson's "Une femme douce" instead, or Antonioni's superior, masterful "Beyond the Clouds", both better films which deal with similar material. See also "In the City of Silvia" and a Wender's misfire called "Lisbon Story". Worth one viewing.

score /10

tieman64 23 December 2011

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2536716/