Recordações da Casa Amarela
Portugal,
1989, 120 min
Shown in 1990
CREDITS
- dir
-
João César Monteiro
- prod
-
João Cesar Bénard, Joaquim into
- scr
-
João Cesar Monteiro
- cam
-
José António Loureiro
- editor
-
Helena Alves, Claudio Martinez
- cast
-
João Cesar Monteiro, Manuela de Freitas, Sabina Sacchi
- source
-
Portuguese Film Institute, Rua Dao Pedro de Alcantara 45-1, 1200 Lisbon, Portugal, FAX: 372-777
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
João Cesar Monteiro attended the screening.
OTHER
Yellow is the color of my true love's walls, and floors, and almost everything else in this irreverent comedy of poor manners set in a Portugese boarding house. Charlie Chaplin meets Dostoevksy's Undergound Man in the figure of João de Deus, a natural-born tramp with a chip on his shoulder (and a thing for epaulets). This spindly, mangy hombre, with his cavernous cheeks and sunken eyes (oh yes, he is played by the writer-director Monteiro!), his bedbugs and his mouth sores, is the curse of this landlady. What's worse, he lusts after woman's clarinet-playing daughter, both in and out of her marching-band uniform. Still, they share the same false pride and same wretched prison—not the boarding house but the body. With a dry humor reminiscent of the Czech New Wave and a visual sensuality that is distinctly Portugese, with dialogue and sound orchestrated to the touch of the image, Monteiro has given deadpan a new meaning. And he has created a picaresque tale for the antihero. By the end of the film, his João is a shell of his former shell and what is black humor has quietly metamorphosed into aggravated assault—not so much the tragedy as the persistance of a ridiculous man. Much patience, bizarrely rewarded. Winner of the Silver Lion Award at Venice.
—Judy Bloch
FACTOID #95
Later to find fame with the amnesia-tinged film noir update Memento, British director Christopher Nolan was nominated for the SKYY Prize in 1998 for his first feature Following. Nolan shot the film about a writer who stalks strangers, on weekends over the course of a year on a budget of $6,000.
