Earlier this year, we lost filmmaker João Canijo. The Portuguese director worked as an assistant director to Manoel de Oliveira, Wim Wenders, Alain Tanner and Werner Schroeter before making his first feature film TRÉS MENOS EU in 1988. His feature film work since then has ranged from macabre noirs to gritty social realism to observational hybrid documentaries and more. He had a career filled with arresting, surprising, dynamic and urgent films. He achieved popular success within Portugal and won awards at international festivals like Berlin and Rotterdam, but his films rarely screen in the United States. Such is the case with his 2023 diptych of mommy issues, broken relationships and family dysfunction MAL VIVER (BAD LIVING) and VIVER MAL (LIVING BAD), which make their NY PREMIERE this May at Spectacle, with two special Mother’s Day weekend double feature screenings.
MAL VIVER
(BAD LIVING)
Dir. João Canijo, 2023.
Portugal, France. 127 min.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, MAY 8 – 7 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 10 – 5 PM
The idea at first was to make MAL VIVER. The film emerged out of a process of development, work-shopping and writing with Canijo and his five lead actresses Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida and Vera Barreto. It portrays the story of three generations of women who own and operate a hotel on the northern shore of Portugal. The relationships between them have grown bitter, resentful, abusive and poisonous. Canijo himself describes the film as about “the anxieties of motherhood” and acknowledges the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s mother-daughter drama AUTUMN SONATA. Anabela Moreira’s performance is particularly devastating. As the middle generation, she wrestles with her failure as both a mother and a daughter, and weathers the grief from both sides. Her portrayal of depression rings true with detail and nuance. As does her relationship with her pet dog Alma. The always redoubtable Rita Blanco gives a menacing turn as the family’s envious matriarch and the lighting by Leonor Teles gives the hotel interiors a funerary beauty and a suffocating warmth, while the compositions separate mother and daughter, using the structure of the building itself, its door frames, walls, and windows frames, to isolate and divide them.
VIVER MAL
(LIVING BAD)
Dir. João Canijo, 2023.
Portugal, France. 124 min.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, MAY 8 – 9:30 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 10 – 7:30PM
VIVER MAL didn’t emerge through a process of dramatic work-shopping like MAL VIVER. The more episodic sister film to MAL VIVER came as idea to Canijo during MAL VIVER’s filming as the filmmaker began to wonder was happening in the lives of the hotel’s guests, seen only in the previous film in brief glimpses, at the edge of the frame, and heard through off-camera dialogue. In VIVER MAL, the stories of the guests, adapted from the August Strindberg plays “Playing with Fire” (1893), “The Pelican” (1907), and “Motherly Love” (1892) take center stage. The drama of the central family is moved to the background, but they are not entirely absent. In fact, more about their situation is revealed in clever and unexpected ways. The stories of the guests in VIVER MAL intersect and overlap each other and intersect and overlap the story of MAL VIVER, giving rise to strange connections and uncanny repetitions. The sound design utilizes layers of overlapping off-screen dialogue, often shouts, screams and replays of arguments from the previous film and from earlier in this film. Sometimes we can place them and sometimes we can’t, but they are unrelenting and inescapable, reinforcing the idea of an unbreakable cycle of trauma which forms the essential link in the two films.