Folklore in evidence
In one of the first films shot in Lisbon, Georges Pallu's O Destino (1922) (Portuguese producers canvassed abroad, France in particular, to find directors), a lady arrives in Lisbon by sea before returning to Sintra. Another French director devoted a short documentary to the city and its emblematic river, entitled Lisbonne et les rives du Tage (Roger Lion, 1924). The early days of Lisboan cinema were characterized by slices of life, which set the tone for a certain Lisboan folklore, on the life of the city's small neighborhoods and their colorful characters. First on this list is José Leitão de Barros's Lisboa (1930), which takes a documentary-style look at the old quarter next to São Jorge Castle, through the docks to the new commercial districts. La Chanson de Lisbonne (José Cottinelli Telmo, 1933) is a classic of the genre, a kind of farce that depicts an amiable Lisbon with a naive charm, where fado already occupies an important place. La Cour aux chansons (Francisco Ribeiro, 1942), set in June during the Feast of the Popular Saints, is yet another, whose popularity has not waned over the years, to the point of benefiting from a remake in 2015. It's a portrait of a Lisbon neighborhood, its petty rivalries, but above all its spirit of camaraderie and taste for ditties. O Leão da Estrela (Arthur Duarte, 1947) first tackled another essential element of Portuguese culture: soccer, and the way in which the rivalry between fans of Sporting Lisbon and FC Porto goes far beyond it. In 1955, Henri Verneuil, working from a screenplay by Joseph Kessel, shot Les Amants du Tage (Lovers of the Tagus) in the Portuguese capital, which offered an ideal backdrop for the film, which was released in Portugal at the cost of a few cuts and provoked the ire of conservative critics. Another noteworthy fact is that fado star Amália Rodriguez plays herself in the film. Ray Milland's The Man from Lisbon (1956), which plays on shoddy folklore, is a curiosity on two counts: it's one of Hollywood cinema's first forays into the city, and the film is the pretext for a stroll through an old-fashioned Lisbon and some of its most famous landmarks (the Hieronymites' monastery, the Belém tower, the Praça do Comércio), just over ten years before James Bond took a turn there in an unloved episode(Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969) on the beach at Cascais and in the Palácio Hotel, where Ian Fleming conceived the idea.
The Lisbon cinema: after the Revolution
Far from these postcard visions, an avant-garde cinema was emerging, showing that Portugal was not impervious to the modernist wave sweeping Europe at the time. This was Cinema Novo, spearheaded by Paulo Rocha and Fernando Lopes. The former signed Les Vertes années (1963), chronicling the love affair between a young provincial and a playful city girl, while the latter followed an ex-boxer in Belarmino (1964), a boldly directed docu-drama that melancholically lifts the veil on the Lisbon of modest folk. This movement heralded the Carnation Revolution, which put an end to the Salazar dictatorship in 1974, and relaunched the career of the prolific and great Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who had made his acting debut in The Song of Lisbon. A native of Porto, where he kept returning to shoot, he chose the Lusitanian capital as the backdrop for a number of fine films such as La Cassette (1994), which, despite its few shots of alleyways and squares, is a condensation of the Lisbon spirit, or Singularités d'une jeune fille blonde (2009), before his death in 2015 at the age of 106. Portugal and Lisbon gradually emerged from their isolation, welcoming foreign directors such as Wim Wenders(L'État des choses, 1982, then its sequel Lisbon Story in 1994) or Alain Tanner(Dans la ville blanche, 1983) for films that shared a certain slowness or languor, and outlined an unstable geography, conducive to wandering. This reverie is also present among Portuguese directors, who make the most of their new-found freedom, such as João Botelho, whose confidential work is placed under the patronage of Fernando Pessoa, the city's leading poet, and his many heteronyms, from Moi, l'autre (2007) to Le Film de l'intranquillité (2010), in which he tackles a seemingly unsuitable book. More renowned, but just as literary, João Cesar Monteiro, a whimsical figure in Lisbon cinema, films the city with love in films that blend austerity and fantasy, notably the so-called God trilogy, in which he also plays the lead role(Souvenirs de la maison jaune in 1989, La Comédie de Dieu in 1995 and Les Noces de Dieu in 1998), and Va-et-vient (2003), his latest film, bathed in summer sunshine.
Lisbon, last margin?
This is confirmed by the work of festival darling Pedro Costa, who films the Lisbon of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, more specifically the deprived neighborhood of Fontainhas and the lives of Cape Verdean immigrants in Ossos (1997), Dans la chambre de Vanda (2000) and En avant, jeunesse (2006). The 1990s saw the beginnings of a more popular form of cinema, indissociable from the great Portuguese star of the time, Maria de Medeiros, who starred in Três Irmãos (Teresa Villaverde, 1994), Adam et Ève (Joaquim Leitao, 1995) and directed a Hollywood-style film about the Carnation Revolution in 2000, Captains of April. Lionel Baier tackles this episode in a pleasant comedy, Les Grandes Ondes (à l'ouest) (2014), in which journalists, who have come to do a completely different story, are caught unawares by the revolution. Another film about a journalist, but from a different era, is Pereira prétend (Roberto Faenze, 1996), an Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni, about a journalist who tries, but fails, to stay out of the political turmoil playing out in Lisbon in the late 1940s. Closer to home, América (João Nuno Pinto, 2010) offers an interesting and gritty insight into the life and misfortunes of a cosmopolitan population in a small fishing village at the mouth of the Tagus, opposite Lisbon. Montanha (João Salaviza, 2016) is the classic tale of a teenager's learning to cope with grief, and focuses on Lisbon in summer. Basil Da Cunha, a Swiss director of Portuguese origin, films the misery of the Reboleira district and its shantytowns doomed to destruction with humanity and poetry in O fim do mundo (2019). Raoul Ruiz pays the city the tribute it deserves in a costume film, Les Mystères de Lisbonne (2010), a whirlwind of stories in which his extraordinary virtuosity shines through once again. Mourir comme un homme (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009), the story of a Portuguese drag queen, and Tabou (Miguel Gomes, 2012), a romantic reverie on the country's colonial past, perpetuate the tradition of minimalist, baroque Portuguese auteur cinema. Just before the city became a fashionable destination, a particularly tasty episode of the late Anthony Bourdain's gourmet series No Reservations (2012) reveals Portugal's culinary wealth. Little by little, a popular cinema is resurfacing, as in the musical biopics devoted to fado star Amália Rodrigues (Carlos Coelho da Silva, 2008), or more recently to pop singer Variações (João Maia, 2019) in a film bearing his name that has been a resounding success in Portugal.
