Sirens and Flames :The Short Films of João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da
Mata
Jimmy Weaver
Film Criticism
Prof. Caryn James
12/13/13
“I’m so sure that my love will survive, because you thrill me, because you kill and
keep me so alive.”
So sings the beguiling nightclub performer Julie Benson (Jane Russell) in Josef
von Sternberg and, following Howard Hugh’s termination of the German auteur’s
contract, Nicholas Ray’s 1952 film noir Macao. This sultry ode to Eros and Thanatos
also opens Portuguese filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da
Mata’s presumably less fraught co-directorial feature début, The Last Time I Saw
Macao (2012). Transgender performer Candy (Cindy Scrash), clad in a form-fitting
metallic cheongsam, a traditional Chinese dress glamourized by Anna May Wong in
another of von Sternberg’s sojourns to the Far East, Shanghai Express (1932), lipsynchs Russell’s song as she saunters about a stage populated with live lions. This
scene is the only time voice and body come close to being unified in The Last Time I
Macao; the film’s unseen, but tellingly named, narrator Guerra da Mata (voiced by
the director, himself), along with a series of phone calls and evocative off-screen
sounds transform the largely motionless, almost ethnographic, tableaus of this port
city into a riveting potboiler. But our willingness to connect the stories we hear
with the images we see, much like Candy’s appropriation of the dead sex symbol’s
song, is only possible through what Michel Chinon calls synchresis, cinema’s unique
ability to forge relationships between the oral and visual. One part Chris Maker, one
part James Bond, a twist of cinephilia, strained through a uniquely Portuguese lens,
The Last Time I Saw Macao marks a significant stylistic break for Rodrigues, who has
been making films since the late-90’s, and it also gestures toward the emerging
aesthetics of Guerra da Mata’s promising solo directorial work, As The Flames Rose
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(2012). Lyrics about the love that thrills and kills are easy listening oxymorons—
barely registered as such. But as multiple sites of seeming oppositions -- between
voice and body, onscreen and off screen presences, male and female bodies, Asia
and Europe, colonialism and contemporaneity, space and time, documentary and
fiction -- abut and layer on each other, boundaries dissolve and the film moves from
a quest for someone to a map of something. That something is an historical
palimpsest whose very indecipherability portends an uncertain future.
The last time most audiences ‘saw’ (or probably even thought of ) Macao was
after Daniel Craig’s 007 gambled, flirted, and fought his way through a sumptuous
red and gold-toned orientalist fantasy of the former colony in Sam Mendes’
blockbuster Skyfall (2012). Candy was similarly lured to the “Las Vegas of the East”
in search of exoticism, the character Guerra da Mata tells us. Soon after her
nightclub performance, Candy mysteriously vanishes into the neon and cement
jungle of Macao, compelling our narrator to search for her and enmeshing him in an
underworld battle over a magical birdcage in the process. The coveted birdcage,
similar to the “great whatsit” in Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic noir, Kiss Me Deadly
(1955), occasions the investigation of a setting which is neither fully Eastern nor
Western and the search for the film’s missing heroine whose very body challenges
the binaries of male and female. Like Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
L’Avventura (1960), the narrator’s quest for his missing friend becomes secondary
to the film’s preoccupation with loss, memory, and liminal spaces.
All these cinematic allusions could overburden most movies, but in the case of
The Last Time I Saw Macao they make a formally challenging film with no onscreen
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dialogue or characters into a more palatable, comprehensible work. But they also
gesture towards what is not there, to what is missing like Candy or never revealed
like the film’s narrator. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s piece isn’t a noir, action,
modernist art, or essay film. Yet these directors clearly have a fondness for such
disparate modes of filmmaking, and traces are found in their other collaborations
like the shorts China, China (2007) and Red Dawn (2011), and Guerra da Mata’s first
solo effort, As the Flames Rose.. While Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata are quite
prolifically crafting exciting hybridized forms befitting global cinema, their output
should be contextualized within the quickly evolving discourse surrounding
contemporary Portuguese filmmaking.
This early decade of the 21st century has been incredibly kind to Portuguese
cinema. Once synonymous with the politically conscious Novo Cinema of the late1960’s and early-1970’s and with the astonishing work of the prolific (and still
active) 104 year-old director Manoel de Oliveira, newer Portuguese films have made
a mark on the contemporary world cinema scene. Films such as Joaquim Sapinho’s
familial drama This Side of Resurrection (2011) and Miguel Gomes’ tale of a volatile
love triangle set against the crumbling colony of Portuguese Mozambique in Tabu
(2012) were lauded during recent festival circuits. To coincide with the US
theatrical release of The Last Time I Saw Macao earlier this fall, the Film Society of
Lincoln Center programmed a retrospective of Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s
short films. The critical appraisal of contemporary Portuguese film appears to be
gradually exceeding the output of the small European country still grappling with a
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legacy of harsh authoritarian rule and contending with the continent’s current
economic context of unemployment, recession, and austerity.
In his essay “Under the Influence” written for the Summer 2012 issue of
Artforum, critic Dennis Lim, a vocal proponent of both contemporary Portuguese
cinema and the work of Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata, argues that the deleterious
impact of the damaged economy, coupled with Portugal’s richly expressive archive
of national myth and its “literal and figurative’ marginal position in Europe helped
to precipitate this newly reenergized cinematic moment. Rather than point to the
grandmaster de Oliveria as this generation’s guiding forefather, Lim singles out
Antonio Reis, a figure largely unknown outside the Iberian Peninsula. While he has
made only a handful of films, Reis repeatedly examines myths of the personal and
the myths of the national by combining ethnographic documentary footage with
fictional narratives, at one turn smoothing out the differences between these
contrasting modes while at others heightening their distinctions and emphasizing
ancient folkloric traditions. The “School of Reis,” a term coined by curator Haden
Guest for the recent retrospectives of the director’s work at the Harvard Film
Archive and the Anthology Film Archives, refers both to the current crop of
Portuguese directors who pair this fusion of documentary and fiction with
storytelling-like narration as well as to those who studied under Reis at Lisbon’s
Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema.
As both a literal and figurative student of Reis, it is not surprising that Rodrigues
has also incorporated these formal preoccupations into his work. More
surprisingly, the increasing involvement of Guerra da Mata, who did not study under
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Reis direction, heightened these thematic and formal echoes. Though they have
been collaborators since the start of João Pedro Rodrigues’ career, João Rui Guerra
da Mata’s involvement has varied from art direction and set design to scriptwriting
and costume design. These early works with Rodrigues behind the camera in the
director’s chair and Guerra da Mata behind the scenes in other capacities still
contain the longing for romantic connections, a nostalgia for lost lovers and eras,
and an emphasis on the’in-betweeness’ of bodies and space. In addition to several
narrative and documentary shorts, Rodrigues has directed three features, all of
which have made their way to North American filmgoers thanks to the festival
circuit and rep cinemas: O Fantasma (2000), Two Drifters (2005), and To Die like a
Man (2009).
Much like The Last Time I Saw Macao, Rodrigues’ feature-length début O
Fantasma is also structured around the twilight and nocturnal explorations of a city.
In this instance, it is the dreary night shift that motivates young garbage collector
Sergio’s (Ricardo Meneses) movements about Lisbon. Well, that and his violent and
erotic obsession with a handsome motorcyclist (Andre Barbosa). Whereas
Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s collaborations are structured around withholding
things from the viewer, O Fantasma lingers on scenes of explicit sex and shows both
the watcher and the watched within the same frame, unlike these later films. Fatal
romantic and sexual attraction finds it way into Rodrigues’ next film, Two Drifters.
Lovers Pedro (João Carreira) and Rui (Nuno Gil), another instance of reflexive
naming from the Portuguese collaborators, suffer a devastating car accident. After
Pedro dies from his injuries, an erratic woman named Odete (Ana Cristina de
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Oliveira) claims that she is pregnant with the dead man’s child and the pair
undergoes dramatic psychological and physical alterations. If (to borrow from Patti
Smith) desire is a hunger, a fire that Rodrigues’ characters breathe in these early
features, then flux and transformation is the state they most often find themselves
in. This is literally the case in Rodrigues’ most recent solo work To Die Like A Man, a
tale of an aging transvestite considering sexual reassignment surgery that is
redolent of Almodóvar and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons
(1978).
The collaborative nature of filmmaking has always made it notoriously difficult
to assign complete authorship to one individual. While it is clear that Guerra da
Mata has played an enormous role in each of Rodrigues’ works, there are noticeable
stylistic shifts when the former joins the later at the director’s helm. Longing and
transition are still central concerns, although they are now enveloped within larger
questions of Portuguese national memory, and the contrasting effects of
documentary and romantically cinematic images are foregrounded. China, China, the
pair’s first directorial collaboration, opens with a long pan across Lisbon’s
Chinatown in a manner befitting a travel documentary, albeit one that chooses to
showcase the bland industrial architecture of the ancient European capital. This
vista is quickly replaced by darkness, and silence dominates the blank screen until
we hear an annoyingly chipper male voice say “ready for your shortcut to English?”.
The voice, coming from some unseen tape deck, begins to recite, “I am a man,”
followed by a female voice slowly declaring, “I am a woman.” Curiously, the female
voice proceeds to say, “I am a girl. I am a boy.” As lights flash on, the blank screen is
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replaced by the image of a young Chinese woman (Chen Jie) smoking in bed, a giant
photorealistic mural of the Manhattan skyline behind her.
In a matter of minutes, Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata have elegantly introduced
their thesis on the inherent instability of dichotomous categories and the way which
differing types of cinematographic images can define a place, the very same
preoccupations that are so central to The Last Time I Saw Macao. The woman,
known simply as “China” in her neighborhood, is then upbraided by her husband
Mariado (Chen Jia Liang) for being late to open the grocery store they own. Her
young son Filho (Luís Rafael Chen) enters the room and begins to whine to his
already berated mother. China’s affect is resigned as she goes about her morning
tasks and her husband chastises her for complaining about their new home. Her
distant nature is suddenly unfastened when she blasts a Portuguese rockabilly song
from her stereo and gleefully dances about the bedroom. This cheerful and
energetic, if eerily erratic, moment is truncated by the woman’s sudden return to
her daily domestic rituals.
Her anxious husband advises her to take their revolver to the store today, in case
there is any trouble during the nightshift. As her son and husband watch John Woo’s
1992 Hong Kong action film, Hard Boiled, she shoots both of them in the back of the
head. After this violent outburst, the colorfully dressed China jaunts through the city
streets of Lisbon, her carefree attitude and almost choreographed movements
recalling the ebullient, dance-prone seaside denizens of Jacques Demy’s The Young
Girls of Rochefort (1967). When she gets to the grocery store, the film returns to its
detached clinical tone, in line with China’s tedious job. Filho’s arrival at the grocery
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store reveals that the apparent murder was all a fantasy. The cycling between
buoyant scenes that luxuriate in the cinematic image and dispassionately
photographed instances of life in this working-class sector of Lisbon, the altering
between fantasy and quotidian structure China, China, until the film’s unexpectedly
tragic end. Like Candy, China is a woman whose is bound and constructed by both
an actual transnational space, in the case, Lisbon, and the never-ending stream of
pop cultural representations, such as the rock song, the New York City mural, and
Woo’s film, which point toward origins that can never truly be recovered.
Guerra da Mata and Rodrigues’ next joint-directorial work, Red Dawn, also marks
their first time filming in the trading port city that will become the subject of their
recent feature. As night turns into day, Red Dawn unflinchingly showcases the
stomach-churning duties workers at The Red Market in Macao must complete
before the fishery welcomes customers in the morning. Rodrigues and Guerra da
Mata hone their gaze on The Red Market’s various operations, their static camera
lingering for what feels like an endless duration on the gutting of writhing fish,
blood filled sinks attracting flies, a growing mound of discarded fish heads, and
overcrowded tanks. Where is the intrusion of fiction, so essential to the duo’s work
and their execution of Reis’ principles? The nauseating images easily distract from
the presence of the film’s more fanciful elements, such at the CGI mermaid that can
occasionally be glimpsed flittering about the murky tanks. She will be unveiled in an
addendum to the film that shows the mythical creature swimming through the
ocean as the words “Goodbye Lady from Macao” flashes over the screen. This short
film is dedicated to the memory of the recently departed Russell, but this isn’t the
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only intertext which connects the mainly documentary footage of Red Dawn to the
saga of the missing cabaret performer. Red Dawn opens with a scene that is
repeated in The Last Time I Saw Macao: a lone black stiletto shoe is run over by a
truck carrying fish to The Red Market. It is almost as if these two film occupy the
same universe, with the world inside the fishery oblivious to Candy’s peril. Taken
together, Red Dawn and The Last Time I Saw Macao form a Mobius strip of reality
and fabrication.
As The Flames Rose, Guerra da Mata’s first solo directorial effort, incorporates this
interplay between real and the fictive, as well as The Last Time I Saw Macao’s
monologic structure, its engagement with the past, and the subject of longing that
runs throughout all of his and Rodrigues’ work. Despite being only 26 minutes long,
As The Flames Rose more powerfully conveys the confused feelings of falling out love
and desperately wanting it back than any of the duo’s previous investigations of
unrequited desire. Loosely inspired by Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine and set
during the devastating Chiado fire of 1988, Guerra da Mata’s film is about a thirtysomething man (João Pedro Rodrigues, no longer behind the camera but captured
by it) waking up after his raucous birthday party and discovering that downtown
Lisbon is burning to the ground. He paces about his room, a sparse set that is
obviously a soundstage adorned only with a bed, a turntable covered in B-52’ s and
Grace Jones records (the only real markers of the time period), and a large window
looking out on another apartment complex. The man looks out the window and calls
his ex (boyfriend? girlfriend? we are never led to know) who lives in the building
across the way.
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What begins as a compassionate call to check in on the former lover as the city
around them is engulfed in flames quickly turns into a bitter squabble. As the
camera zooms in on the man, it becomes clear that the window is an actually a large
LED screen. Rather than use quotation or allusion, Guerra da Mata literalizes the
importance screens play in our lives. At one point, flames replace the apartment
complex on the window-screen. Fire slowly gives way to archival footage and news
reports showing the destruction of this historic area known for its ancient Moorish
architecture, an understated allusion to the fact that long before Portugal became a
colonizing power it was already a transitional space caught between Europe and
North Africa. With no where to go, the man talks to his ex, reminiscing about their
life together in London, teasing them about their musical taste, and lamenting their
return to Lisbon and the conservatism he perceives there.
The man oscillates between anger and yearning. Though the ex’s voice is never
head, it is apparent that they try to hang up at several points, driving the man into
fits of depression and contempt. Throughout their conversation, the screen indexes
the actual disintegration of buildings by using found footage that also functions as
projections of the man shattered emotions. When the lover finally hangs up, the
despondent man’s plays a record on his turntable. Although anachronistic, the song
which ends the film, 2011’s “The Wilhem Scream” by British electronic musician
James Blake, seems in line with the taste of this man. Though not historically
anchored to that fiery day, it evokes the painful loss he associates with it.
“I don’t know about my dreams, I don’t know about my dreaming anymore. I
don’t about my love, I don’t know about my loving anymore. All that I know is I’m
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falling,” Blake mournfully croons, as though the song were a melancholic response
to the romantic idealism of Russell’s showstopper featured in The Last Time I Saw
Macao. More than East or West, documentary or fiction, perhaps it is the divergence
between painful realties and wishful fantasies that is the ultimate site of
contradiction where Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata find motivation and meaning in
their work. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s films are ultimately not about missing
the thing you’ve lost. Rather, they are about missing the idealized memory of that
thing which is gone forever, be it a screen siren, a historic neighborhood, a friend, or
a lover. You hope to find your lost object of desire, an object steeped in fact and
fiction. You know, however, as the flames of time rise and char the past, you will
only ever get the approximation of it. And maybe that’s what you really wanted after
all.
Works Cited
Lim, Dennis. “Under the influence: Dennis Lim on Antonio Reis and Margarida
Cordeiro.” Artforum, Summer 2012. Online.
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