There’s a studied impassivity to this elegant Portuguese movie about grief from Susana Nobre. It’s a film that maintains its near-affectless deadpan style from first to last, and declines to offer a conventional emotional payoff, or indeed the usual narrative shape that might lead to such a climax – although there is an emotional outpouring of sorts. It isn’t exactly that sadness finds its outlet in oblique or unusual ways (the heavy drinking we see is, after all, a commonplace symptom) but the way it is represented on screen is indirect.
Helena (Raquel Castro) is a production manager on a film shoot, dealing with a difficult director. She is divorced, sharing custody of a teen daughter, and in a relationship with a musician who is away on tour. Her elderly widowed mother, who lives in a Lisbon apartment block called Cidade Rabat, where Helena grew up, is talking openly about her approaching death and wants Helena to live in the flat after she’s gone – an idea that stirs up oppressive emotions.
Helena provides the narrative voiceover to the film’s dry prologue, simply showing the front doors to all the flats in the building and reminiscing about the occupants: a typically opaque but intriguing introduction. When her mother dies, Helena has to accompany the coffin to her home town in Garvão in the south, boldly interrupting the funeral to state that her mother was not a believer. In the succeeding months she gets embarrassingly drunk at a wedding and is later breathalysed and sentenced to community service for driving while over the limit; she is ordered to work at a youth sports club and reprimanded by the owner for failing to help with the washing up.
That experience is not precisely the lesson in humility that it might be in a Hollywood type of movie; Helena is not in the slightest arrogant or insensitive, although her teen daughter is a little exasperated with her. Her life just rolls along, leading to tears – although Nobre does not supercharge these with meaning. There is a refined intelligence at work in this film, a sympathy that keeps it residually alive in your mind after the final credits.
• Cidade Rabat is at the ICA Cinema, London, from 29 March.
