Hedgehog_Carnival Reviews

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Introducing the "I Hated Dead Poets Society" Society

[4/10 · 17 September 2005]

Oh-so-"strict", repressive boys' prep school. Kewl teacher arrives. Kewl teacher gets pupils to like poetry (sic) and say "carpe diem" a lot. One commits suicide because of his strict, repressive, killjoy Dad. Kewl teacher sacked. Pupils make meaningless gesture of solidarity and feel smug about it. End of film.

It's a long time since I saw it, so I may have missed something out. But you get the idea.

I wouldn't have bothered to add a comment, only I was taken aback when checking the other comments, to find there was, in the first two pages at least, not a single user recorded as having disliked this movie as I did.

It's empty, fatuous stuff, pandering to "nobody understands me" adolescent whining, and cynically pushing an innocuous, market-friendly brand of smug irresponsibility in the guise of "non-conformity". How well the movie teaches non-conformity can be perhaps best judged by the other user comments: a chorus of sheeplike "carpe diem, yeah! right on!"s with not a single original insight anywhere to be seen.

"Cease the day" I especially liked. And the carpe diem teeshirt idea. This movie seems so made for ruminants, maybe it should come with a foot-and-mouth jab.

As a matter of verifiable fact, no English teacher in the history of the world has ever succeeded in getting a significant number of pupils to like poetry. I say "verifiable", because if it were otherwise, published (live) poets would be able to live comfortably off their royalties. As another matter of verifiable fact, telling kids to rip pages out of books does not garner teachers "respect", only contempt - there's always a critical mass of students in any class who are at least intelligent enough to see through a poser.

This is a McMovie if ever there was one.

Last Action Hero (1993)

Harmless fun

[5/10 · 19 August 2005]

Until I saw this (as part of a captive audience on a bus travelling to Quito), I was probably one of the few people alive who had never seen a Schwarzenegger movie.

I'm still not sure that I've seen one, and not only because the thing was dubbed into Spanish. But going by reputation alone, this film makes you feel you've just seen everything Arnold has ever done, conveniently compressed and amusingly exaggerated and self-parodied to boot. Which can't be bad.

I don't watch low-grade action movies as a rule. Yet even I could at least smile at some of the obvious send-ups and references here, which extend beyond the specific genre of shoot-'em-up action to embrace such things as the cartoon laws of physics or the convention of the villain's "before I kill you, here's what I plan to do" speech which we all know from the Bond films. Not much of the parody is particularly intelligent or subtle (Leslie Nielsen does this kind of thing better), but it is disarmingly good-natured and unserious, and the timing is generally adequate - tired old gag follows mildly amusing in-joke fast enough to make the thing look lively, or even, for some viewers, "stylish" (sic), if not exactly fresh or daring. Plus there are enough two-wheeling, bridge-hopping, exploding cars for your money to make the thing justify its parodic remit.

As far as I can tell, the film scores low with critics who wanted it to take itself a bit more seriously than it obviously does. It's true that the last third of the film seems to come unstuck at a worrying pace, and I agree with whoever it was who found it annoying that the "real world" that Slater strays into begins by frustrating his expectations, as it should, but then, unaccountably, adjusts to them to the point where it allows him to perform an unconscionably silly Heroic Rescue Of Child, complete with undercurrent of schmaltzy sentimentality - one aspect of Hollywood scriptcraft that this movie does not even attempt to take issue with. And yes, the intrusion of Bergman's Grim Reaper at the end is pure toe-curling embarrassment: it reads as "look at me! I've watched a serious movie" self-advertisement on the scriptwriters' part, with no other apparent raison-d'etre. That last chunk of plot is disappointing, and does definitely need a rethink.

So - daring, iconoclastic this movie is certainly not, and no, it doesn't have what you would call a coherent plot, although it might have had, if the scriptwriters hadn't apparently hit the bottle head-on towards the end of what was presumably a six-crate overnight slog. But it's good, harmless fun, and has the odd inspired touch - like the Schwarzenegger version of Hamlet, which I defy any high school English Lit teacher to not find funny.

What surprised me most is that the Governator comes across in this movie as quite a likable, humorous, self-deprecating guy. But maybe that's down to the poor quality of the dubbing. Some scripts do occasionally come out better in Spanish.

The Mother (2003)

Michell redeems himself

[9/10 · 7 June 2004]

It's hard to imagine a director capable of such godawful crap as 'Notting Hill' pulling off something as sensitive and as attractive as this, but well, here's the evidence and it's quite compelling. Several have alluded to TV drama, and yes, this does have a seventies Play for Today feel at times, but is always a cut above, mainly I think owing to some quite superlative acting from Anne Reid and to a fine script which shadow-boxes with cliché without ever getting one on the nose, except maybe right at the end. (I didn't like either the tracking shot of indifferent goodbyes through the hallway, nor the oh-what-a-beautiful-morning final scene: she deserved a more studied finale than that I think, after all that hard work. The slippers business was a bit OTT too, on reflection).

What I mean about avoiding cliché: well, I for one had a sinking expectation that the "mature" man May's daughter tries to set her up with would be cast in 2 dimensions as a repulsive old bore, so as to point the contrast more painfully with the attractive, virile young geezer he is unwittingly competing with. Instead, we get an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic cameo of a lonely, clumsy, not entirely unlikeable and very human fellow, who nevertheless doesn't have much of a clue about entertaining a woman. It was around that point I started to sit up and pay more attention. Here was a script that let the actors breathe and do something interesting with fairly minor parts. Almost Mike Leigh in that respect (minus the contrived catharses that the latter inexplicably goes in for).

And of course I was, as everyone probably was, dumbfounded by what Anne Reid does with her character and with her body. She's /not/ "the repressed, dutiful housewife discovering herself for the first time", this is far too simplistic for the character we have. Again and again there are allusions to her having been a "bad housewife", not to mention that thing she does with trays, trying to look nurturing and comely and only succeeding in looking awkward. The daughter accuses her of having "sat in front of the TV all day" instead of, well, whatever her motherly duties might be presumed to have been: she has no answer. She never was a model wife and mother, at least not to herself - that's where a lot of the poignancy comes from, the sense of someone having wasted a life trying to fulfil a role she simply wasn't good at, ever.

El Sur (1983)

Deserves a remake

[7 June 2004]

I liked this movie, but was mildly surprised to find it getting, here, the uncritical praise it has done.

First of all, for those who haven't seen it, it's a film that gets people raving first and foremost not about the acting (which is excellent, if a little too dispassionate and throttled-back in Antonutti's case for my own tastes), nor the plot (which is resolutely episodic) but the cinematography. The best way I can describe it is to say that it's shot like a succession of Rembrandt paintings brought to life. If ever a film's lighting stole the show, this film is it. Ten out of ten on that score.

Secondly, for those who have seen it, well, didn't anyone else notice what to me was the film's one big flaw? I mean the POV question. Here you have a beautifully filmed version of a subtle, sensitive story of a young girl's relationship with her father. All the way through there is frequent offscreen narrative punctuation in the first person. It's a story quite clearly /told/ from the girl's POV, and all the director needed to do was make sure it was /consistently seen/ from that point of view, both in terms of preferred camera angles and in terms of the information we are allowed access to - and we might have had a full-blown masterpiece on our hands. Instead, the strength and emotional intensity of the film are constantly being diluted by (it seems to me) wholly unnecessary interpolations of information the girl herself /could not have had access to/ (e.g. and most notably, the contents of the letter her father receives from his old flame). Thus, we are artificially distanced from the sense of mystery felt by her by knowing more than she does at key moments, and more than we really need to know ourselves. The magical realism element should have been respected just a little more than it was.

I also think that another less fastidious director might have found ways of quietly pointing up the contributions made by the various narrative episodes (the potentially v. powerful water-divining scene, the relatives' visit, the cinema poster, the glimpse through the cafe window, the lie told to Mum, the graffiti-mad boyfriend) to the film's overarching theme: a vital but absent and mysterious "South" that runs like an underground stream through the girl's youthful, very Northerly experience. The idea is a beautiful one, and the film sort of captures it, but only if you run with the idea yourself quite a bit between scenes. I don't know if the audience's sympathetic imagination needs to be made to work /quite/ so hard in this medium, where just /showing/ is so easy to do.

In short, I think this film is excellent, but could have been better than it was, and deserves a remake.

Carmen (2003)

Missable

[2/10 · 17 May 2004]

When I saw this in the cinema, I remember wincing at the bad acting about a minute or two into the first scene, then immediately telling myself "no, this has to get better". It didn't. The performances are pretty uniformly teak 'n pine and no, there is NO sexual chemistry in this film whatsoever, just the awkward posturings of a reasonably comely, discreetly talentless actress who seems born to grace the cover of "Interviú" and not much else besides. If the scriptwriter thought that making Mérimée a character was a stunningly original creative ploy he perhaps ought to get out more. And Aranda, if he'd given the matter a bit more thought, would have realised that the story of Carmen is just CRYING OUT for a thoughtful, iconoclastic, parodic deconstruction, not this leave-your-brains-at-the-turnstile affair of ersatz passion and comic-book dialogue. This is contemporary Spanish cinema at its worst.

Historias de la radio (1955)

Dated, wincingly sentimental, mildly entertaining

[9 May 2004]

By the time he made this, Sáenz de Heredia (who also filmed the Generalísimo's pungent attempt at a movie script, "Raza") was as efficient a facilitator of respectable, high-gloss, low-calorie regime-friendly entertainments as they come. Where this one deserves most credit is in the storyline, which contrives to hang several short tales onto a single narrative thread. The device works, and this in combination with a suavely persuasive offscreen narrator gives a sense that "the radio" is not merely a plotting pretext, but the object of a genuinely felt tribute. Of course we're talking not about the radio as instrument of government propaganda, nor as purveyor of mindless muzak, but as something that gets fat middle-aged men out of bed in the morning (to do slimming exercises), gives humble inventors the chance to win money for their prototypes (by dressing up as eskimos), persuades thieves to reach agreement with their intended victims in donating money to the Church, and allows old schoolmasters to win money in a quiz game called "Double or Nothing", in order (natch) to send a sick child to Stockholm for treatment.

When Heredia tries his hand at straightforward slapstick, as with the José Isbert number of the eskimo-inventor with the dangerous dog early in the film, it's quite nicely done, and the laughs come easily. When he laces the comedy with sentimentality, and deliberately racks up the sentiment in a steady crescendo throughout, it would take a very undemanding (or old-fashioned) audience nowadays not to get restless. That a dispute (for example) between would-be burglar and intended victim is resolved by a Parish priest is perhaps sociologically admissible; that this priest should be portrayed as a paragon of wisdom and Christian virtues is perhaps understandable given ths strictures of censorship and so on; but the sentimental excesses of this movie go well beyond that, and include a penitent bread-thief in a church, a dying boy whose every other script sentence contains a Noble Gesture; and a schoolmaster who is so well aided by the praying boy and the intercession of Saints, that he develops a previously unsuspected footballing career. If this kind of thing doesn't stand up so well nowadays (not to mention statues of saints that come alive) it's perhaps just a question of fashion. All the same, you end up thanking your nearest St Antony for the genius of a Berlanga, who could make a film funny without playing any of the cheap sentiment cards that this movie has recourse to. Watchable but terminally dated.

The Executioner (1963)

An astonishing masterpiece

[24 April 2004]

Like "Bienvenido Mr Marshall", this film earns its keep first of all by being wickedly funny, an achievement that once again depends partly on the director's gift for distilling his somewhat baleful observation of Spanish society into a series of deft, economical verbal and visual gags and tableaux, and partly on the talents of the unforgettable Jose Isbert, who plays, with variations, his inherited role as an apparently humourless old man to whom hilarious situations just casually adhere as he muddles through life. In "Mr Marshall" a sly rascal with a curiously intermittent hearing problem, here he acquires a touch of the wry reflectiveness of the old man whose profession condemns him to virtual social ostracism, who can invite his future son-in-law to "here, put your fingers into this light socket" with all the casual gentility of someone offering a top-up to a glass of sherry.

Next to him, and reaching over from comedy towards understated tragedy, Nino Manfredi turns in a flawless performance as the young man who dreams of going to Germany to learn the trade of mechanic, but gets prodded and browbeaten into a hasty marriage, then into accepting the title and benefits of a job he hopes never to have to perform, and then... The way this progression is conveyed is masterly: while he's clearly (and fatally) manipulable (esp. by his wife), we are never for a moment allowed to dismiss, or laugh at, his character as a simpleton, even though we may laugh with uneasy recognition at his clumsy attempts at courtship (distilled in an EXT scene where he first cleans the dog-dirt from his shoe, then invites his beloved to dance, then gets shouted at for "using up someone else's music" and ends up having to provide the music himself by whistling). He is, we decide, a decent human being who mostly tries to stay out of trouble and do the right thing for himself, his wife and future offspring - the true guilt lies elsewhere. The obscure tragedy we see happening is of a man being gradually and remorselessly deprived of his values and self-respect before he's even had time to become fully aware of them or decide how important they are to him. The implied social criticism leading on from that (throttled back, as always, to get past the censors) is fairly obvious.

Which leads us to those astonishing final scenes: the fairylit grotto in Palma de Mallorca where a largely tourist audience wait expectantly for some watery spectacle to occur, only to see a surreal tricorned Civil Guard drifting through in a boat and calling out to Manfredi's "Jose Luis Rodriguez" in a stentorian, megaphone-amplified "whisper"; then the scene in which we are offered a crane shot of an unfurnished prison yard with a door in the far corner, towards which we watch Jose Luis being hustled or dragged, weakly protesting, by a mixed contingent of priest and guards, very much as if he himself were the condemned prisoner. There's something so allusively haunting about that shot - whether it's the poignant detail of the dropped hat, whether the stuffing of a fat group of black-clothed people through a narrow door inspires Biblical reminiscences or suggests a birth in reverse - that it alone propels this film into some pretty select company in terms of artistic greatness. But, again like Mr Marshall, this film is so packed with visual and verbal gems that it would take a book, and several dozen viewings, to come anywhere near doing it justice.

Red Planet (2000)

Puzzlingly bad

[11 April 2004]

It's the middle of the 21st century. Owing to unspecified problems with "pollution", humanity is doomed to extinction within a short time unless Mars can be colonised. Lest there should be any doubt about whether the extinction of humanity would be a good idea or not, the cast of characters includes a "philosopher" who is there to tell us that it certainly wouldn't be. "What would happen to History? What about art and music? and what about people who died for freedom? If humanity disappeared, it would all be for nothing!" Well yeah, good point, never thought of that. Neither, apparently, have the folks at Houston, who only provide one manned mission, one spacecraft, no back-ups, no measuring equipment for use on arrival on Mars, in fact very little beyond a robot hound that switches to "Military Mode" (i.e. "attack your companions mode") as soon as its circuitry is jarred. But it turns out that, silly as it is, this 2001 HAL rehash is actually the only halfway interesting element in a puzzlingly bad movie, which breaks every beginner-level screenwriting rule in the book for no apparent reason beyond a strange kind of deathwish.

For example, the old "don't tell, show!", found in the first chapter of every writing manual I've come across, receives short shrift in the first two minutes of this movie, where we are _told_, by the ship's commander-cum-narrator, what each crew member's salient personality trait is for the remainder of the film. Which is just as well, because the acting is so lifeless that without these character sketches it would be hard to tell the male leads apart. The same complaint could be levelled at the plot, which "shows" very little other than a lack of direction and control. If you are going to rework _Alien_ and have your characters picked off one by one by a terrifying foe, make it ONE terrifying foe and not an apparently random confluence of killer robot, bad temper, bad luck, nasty prawns and a ruptured spleen. Some of the plot elements are potentially strong enough to support a certain amount of interest and atmospheric tension - the mystery of the disappearing algae, the sinister and brooding presence of Life On Mars, the nemesis robot, the guilty conscience of one crew member - but there is no overriding shape to the plot which gives any one of these elements enough prominence at the right time for it to really impact the audience. Every time something new happens, there is a sense of a desperate scriptwriter reaching out for the next fallback fix to stave away boredom. Hence we get cliche after hackneyed cliche - the bumpy crash-landing, the heroic "you guys go on without me" (_twice_), the homicidal robot, the race against time (at least three races against time, for good measure), etc. Last I looked, there was a little more to creating a film than just assembling a checklist of ingredients that worked in other films and throwing them all together in a hopeful pile.

Yet that's all this film does. And it contains enough hilarious gaffes (e.g. the puzzling solar flare that reaches out to Mars but misses Earth, the walking-distance proximity of all these old but still-working space probes, the insect-like "Nematodes", the killer robot that conveniently has second thoughts first time around, the ludicrous suggestion that people in 2057 will have "web sites" and listen to The Police and the Stones, the breathable atmosphere that somehow went undetected by all previous missions, etc etc) to make this a kind of landmark in bad science fiction. For that alone, and for the red-tinted photography and the camp cuteness of robot AIMEE's disco moves, I suppose I can stretch to a 1 out of 10. But that's being kind. If you have a choice between seeing this film and watching a line of ants carry a currant-cake crumb from behind your fridge to a crack in the wall, go for option 2.

Welcome Mr. Marshall! (1953)

Works on every level

[25 February 2004]

Widely regarded (at least among older generations of Spaniards) as Spain's best ever film, this is first and foremost a comedy of rural manners that still, fifty years on, succeeds in its primary objective of making the audience laugh (show this to any Spanish-speaking audience in the world and you'll get giggles throughout. Beware, though, some of the humour is untranslatable or at least unsubtitleable.) On another level, it's a clever, ironic commentary upon the predicament of fifties Spain, isolated from the rest of the world not only politically but in pretty much every other respect too.

The film kicks off with an extended voice-over introduction in which a narrator introduces us to a village and its main characters, playfully exploiting the odd camera trick (freeze-frames, emptying a scene of people) and establishing a tone of gentle, affectionate irony towards the inhabitants. This offscreen narrator returns regularly through the film and the tone of the narration crucially defines how we respond to what we see on screen. The characters include the mayor (a shrewd old man suffering from intermittent deafness), a benign local priest, an "hidalgo" (soi-disant member of the nobility, obsessed with his ancestral heritage), a young, pretty schoolmistress, and a few others; there are also two important visitors, an Andalusian songstress and her jovial, sharp-witted agent.

The action of the film consists of the following (spoiler). News reaches the village that "the Americans are coming" in order to implement the Marshall plan, which is interpreted as the handing out of gifts to all the villagers. After a public meeting in which the schoolmistress and the priest between them attempt to define America to the villagers' satisfaction, the mayor teams up with the singer' agent to ensure the village puts on a good show to impress the visiting dignitaries, mainly by dressing itself up as a kind of folksy Andalusian village complete with guitar strummers and false building facades. Villagers queue up to have their individual requests recorded in advance (one item only). Finally, the Americans do arrive, but the visit consists of a cavalcade of fast cars that simply sweep through without stopping. (The last car has the word "Goodbye", in English, prominently displayed.) The villagers realise they have to pay for all the expense incurred in what turns out to have been a wasted show, but are not too unhappy: they take the disappointment stoically as "just one of those things".

As already mentioned, what carries the story is a combination of the gentle, affectionate tone of the narration, together with almost unstoppable wry humour, both verbal and visual, and sometimes quite subtle (the narrator asserts that the schoolmistress' arithmetic is beyond reproach: later, we notice some wrong adding up on the blackboard). The acting is first rate, the camera work slick, and all in all, if this isn't still Spain's best film it certainly deserves a place in the top three.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)

Glenn Ford perfectly convincing

[6 September 2003]

A film that's always been held in a great deal of affection here in Spain (and not just because it's a Blasco Ibañez story, nor because hearing it dubbed into Spanish relieves us of Angela Lansbury). As far as I'm concerned, and pace the other reviewers, Glenn Ford's utterly convincing portrayal of Julio is by far the best thing about it. So what if he's a bit long in the tooth? a great many real-life playboys are, and his maturity makes the romantic dilemmas posed by the plot all the more poignant. From start to finish he's seriously, dangerously likeable, which he certainly needs to be in order to win the love of a beautiful, intelligent and patriotic Frenchwoman over her heroic Resistance husband. The romance actually convinces, against the odds, and saves a movie that might otherwise easily have been a ghastly flop.

After all, what else is there? Andre Previn's music is impressively dramatic but there is a worrying lack of restraint in the score, both in the overblown intro and the pretty but intrusive "love theme" cue, complete with solo violin, which insists on being heard every time the hero and heroine so much as glance at one another. The "four horsemen" vision manages to stay just this side of Monty Python (with the aid of swirling clouds), but doesn't save the opening scenes of the film from lurching full-pelt into overplayed melodrama (the death of the patriarch Madariaga: one too many thunderclaps for a start), and doesn't tie in too well with what was eventually left in from Blasco Ibañez's tale (pestilence? famine? where?). The plot is 100% predictable, and the rest of the acting is competent without being memorable.

I must admit, though, I was impressed by the very Minnelli-esque sequence which took Ford's eyes staring at a scene of dancing and frivolity between Nazi officers and collaborationist women, superimposing the two and mixing in newsreel-style war footage; likewise, Henreid's heartstopping portrayal, in one scene, of a man almost broken by torture, emerging from a Gestapo jail; and the finely judged acceleration at the end towards the story's predictable but satisfying climax. Not a film I will want to make a habit of seeing, but would certainly stand a second and maybe even a third viewing.

Blow-Up (1966)

First impressions

[5 September 2003]

Possible starting point: recall those much-imitated Hitchcock moments of sudden perceived significance (the stamps in _Charade_, the jewellery in _Vertigo_, etc)? Antonioni has one such here: the moment when his protagonist realises Redgrave is actually looking at /something/ in that photo. He draws a line following the direction of her gaze into the shrubbery, and the viewer thinks "at last - a plot!" Which of course, it turns out not to be, or at least, not the plot we expect. The moment, beautifully handled as it is, doesn't turn out to involve hero as detective, but merely as helpless observer of a story as old as the Old Testament, and ultimately as unresolved. Whatever we might /think/ we see in the Blow Up, Redgrave's photographed expression tells its own story: she's looking at the Serpent, and this is the Fall.

Before seeing this film, I expected the "park" to be one of those bleak London commons. In fact, it's a fairly iconic, un-English affair of trompe-l'oeil vales lined with close, rustling vegetation, plus (of course) that solitary Tree in the middle, blatant as you like. The surrounding Eden is a fragmented, tourist's-eye-view of 60s Swinging London, but with none of the celebratory naivete of so much 60s docudrama: Antonioni's view of the transient, arty subculture he depicts is for me pleasingly baleful, far more than would have probably been appreciated at the time. There isn't a single remotely likeable character in the film, for one thing, and clearly wasn't meant to be. The camera ranges obsessively over such epiphenomena as nervous sucking at joints, the sheeplike conformity of a rock audience, the irritating infantilism of girl groupies and wannabe "models": having covered all this, it gives us the wonderful joke of a "lignum crucis" guitar fingerboard being first fought over, then quizzically cast aside as worthless. A world that's utterly rootless, without past or future or even any present purpose: antiques (history, the past) are not the business to be in, says the impatient shop owner; the ragging students are collecting money for we know not what, perhaps for nothing at all; the Ban the Bomb march is pathetically small, ineffectual and incoherent. An eternal present, then, made habitable only by drugs and perhaps sex (wrestling on a paper bed?). This is the "innocence" from which Redgrave's fall from grace dramatically separates her (and perhaps, by extension, the protagonist, but we don't get to see this happening). But where it takes her - the film is utterly silent on this score, offering (to the exasperation of successive generations of viewers) not even the courtesy of a superficial plot resolution. In other words, staying honest and mysterious to the end.

A selfconscious film: mirrors within mirrors. The painter, early on, whose abstract pictures eventually, on examination, arrange themselves into some semblance of the figurative: nothing is consensual, all is private interpretation. The exquisite photography of the film reflected in the hero's own aesthetic quest. A story told, pretty much entirely, in pictures (the sparse dialogue being oddly banal and unreal). The fragmented nature of the screenplay, impressing itself on the mind as a series of stills, each laden with symbolic weight. Too early to say, but I think this movie is going to stick in my mind and demand successive viewings, and is going to crawl its way up my list of favourites and recommended "must sees". There's clearly far too much in here for a single viewing to yield up. Unexpectedly impressive.

According to Pereira (1995)

Still convinces after a fourth viewing

[20 July 2003]

A thoughtful story, impeccably acted, free from cinematic cliche, holding the attention at every moment, raising a few smiles, and lingering long in the memory. What more could a discerning filmgoer want? Good music? It's got that too (Dulce Pontes).

Mastroianni brings magisterially to life the outwardly grey and unremarkable literary journalist of the title - a widower approaching retirement age who lives on nostalgic memories of his wife, with whose photo he habitually converses, and tries to ignore the increasingly unpalatable turn things are taking around him owing to the rise of fascism (we're in late-30s Lisbon). His prudent, mild-mannered apoliticism comes under threat when he employs a naive and passionate Italian rebel as an obituary-writer, then discovers that his own generous human instincts oblige him reluctantly to intervene when the young Italian gets into trouble and has to go on the run from the authorities. Thus, he finds himself being drawn into political commitment in spite of his own instincts and lifelong habits - a transition he cannot explain even to himself except in terms of a picturesque philosophical theory ("community of souls") offered by his doctor (a sympathetic and amusing secondary character).

The film's memorable moments are many, including a grotesque reconstruction of fascist propaganda being shown at a cinema, a couple of finely-observed encounters between Pereira and his craven, dull-witted boss, and an unforgettable scene in which Pereira is forced to witness at first hand the sneering, lumpen brutality of Portugal's new fascist rulers (an event that finally prods him into taking decisive, if ultimately little more than symbolic, action).

This movie presents a struggle between opposing forces within the individual, with kindness and generosity ranged against prudent self-interest and force of habit, and it does so with delicacy and finesse.

No knowledge of Portugal's history is required or assumed, though it /is/ assumed that viewers will understand references to the Spanish Civil War and will be able to place the phenomenon of European fascism in some sort of historical/conceptual context. Period "feel" and locations are expertly re-created. All in all, a very creditable piece of film-making that stands up well to repeated viewings.