A idade maior
Portugal,
1990, 120 min
Shown in 1992
CREDITS
- dir
-
Teresa Villaverde
- prod
-
Joao Pedro Bénard
- scr
-
Teresa Villaverde
- cam
-
Effi Mikesch
- editor
-
Vasco Pimentel, Manuela Viegas
- cast
-
Ricardo Colares, Teresa Roby, Joaquim de Almeida, Maria de Medeiros
- source
-
Coralie Films
-
COMMENTS
Teresa Villaverde in person.
OTHER
The reluctant memories of Alex return us to the early ’70s when Alex was a ten-year-old and Portugal was wrenched by a futile colonial war in Africa. War visits Alex's family with his father Pedro's conscription. Alex and his mother fill the void with the richly evoked daily routines of small-town life. Level-headed but lively Manuela (superbly characterized by Teresa Roby) busies herself with running her bistro, counseling her daffy, lovelorn waitress Barbara (played with high whimsy by the wonderful Maria de Medeiros) and keeping at arm’s length Pedro's sensitive but perhaps overly solicitous friend, Mario. At school or with his mother, Alex daydreams about his father and lives for Pedro’s less and less frequent letters home. Time passes and when the letters cease altogether, the consolations of friends and familiar pastimes falter and despair seeps in. Pedro’s mysteriously delayed return brings not joy but confusion and tragedy. History, said Sartre, happens behind our backs. Though events over the shoulder of the globe in Africa tear Alex’s father from his family, director-writer Teresa Villaverde displays impressive restraint in keeping history off-screen, instead focusing our gaze on Alex’s unraveling family. Villaverde's vivid scenes of Manuela struggling against abandonment or of Pedro sinking into self-loathing will remain as indictments of war’s “collateral damage” long after the film’s historical context fades from memory.
—George Eldred
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
