11/11/2013 - The Portuguese filmmaker returns to direct a feature twenty years after Midnight and A Girl In Summer. In competition at the International Rome Film Festival

The second European film to be presented in competition at the Rome International Film Festival (8-17 November) after the Turkish, French, German and Greek coproduction I Am Not Him [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (read the review), A Vida Invisível [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (The Invisible Life) marks the return of Portuguese filmmaker Vítor Gonçalves 25 years after his last film, Midnight, and 27 after his acclaimed debut A Girl In Summer, considered one of the biggest films in Portuguese cinema.

A Vida Invisível is a rare and enigmatic piece of work, which explores internal worlds, travels through memory and makes much use of an off-screen voice. The voice belongs to Hugo (Filipe Duarte - photo) and his thoughts. Hugo is a government worker in his forties, touched by the death of his boss, Antonio (João Perry), who it seems was also a good friend. At night, sitting on the stairs of the ministry where he works, Hugo thinks back to when the old man revealed to him he was about to die. Antonio wanted to own up to something, which touched him personally and handed over a small 8mm film. Pushed to find out what it was all about, Hugo will try and uncover the truth, especially surrounding Adriana (Maria João Pinho), the woman he loved. He is then overwhelmed by a feeling that his life was not one that was lived to the full. Is this what his friend Antonio tried to tell him? Maybe.

Hugo is a man isolated from the world, melancholic, who lets life pass him by outside of his window. “I wanted to speak of the main character’s intimate life,” Gonçalves says, “but also look at the outside – something Hugo actually sees from afar, which doesn’t belong to him.” From there, the fixed, repeated framing of Lisbon’s Commerce Square, a highly symbolic place. “For us Portuguese, the square in the film has an important meaning. It is the place where in the last two centuries, the country’s public life took place. It is where the King Carlo was assassinated, where important Republic events and anti-fascist demonstrations took place.”

A Vida Invisível comes across as a very personal film (“there is an autobiographical shadow in the film, especially in Hugo’s isolation and melancholy,” the director admits), but also a kind of homage by Gonçalves to his friend and mentor António Reis (after whom the character is named), another Portuguese cinema maestro who introduced him to the world of directing. Producer Pedro Fernandes Duarte (Rosa Filmes) was a great supporter of the film and the man behind it: “I learned a lot from Vitor. Whoever does cinema in Portugal today has been his student (Gonçalves teaches at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School). It is a special film. Only a directing maestro like him could have done it.” The young producer concluded a presentation at the Roman festival with an attack on the Portuguese ruling class: “the neo-liberal government is hiding behind the crisis in order to stop financing and kill cinema. The money is there. But I have faith that things will change.”

(Translated from Italian)