Love and Rationality in 19th-Century Portugal: Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca

Love stories don’t come much more loveless than they do in the culminating film in de Oliveira’s Tetralogy of Frustrated Love.

Francisca
Photo: Grasshopper Film

Love stories don’t come much more loveless than Francisca, a film in which the very concept is perceived as a ludicrous affectation, if not an outright aberration, of human behavior. Culminating Manoel de Oliveira’s international reputation-making Tetralogy of Frustrated Love, the 19th century-set Francisca charts over several years of narrative time the obliteration of a man’s dignity as his ruthless social circle argues vehemently against his union with the eponymous heiress on the grounds that such bonds, particularly when conducted in the name of passion, are the purest form of egotism.

Working in the mannered long-take aesthetic sharpened in his prior Doomed Love, de Oliveira restricts nearly all display of outward emotion from his diagrammatic tableaux; even eye contact between characters is kept to a minimum, though eye contact with the viewer is abundant. At nearly three hours, this commitment to emotional and formal repression might seem daunting, yet Francisca makes for an oddly enthralling viewing experience.

The film’s m.o. is announced in its opening shot, the first of many demolitions of the fourth wall. In the foreground, mustachioed aristocrat José Augusto (Diogo Dória) stares directly into the camera, his face a scowl of disenchantment, while a soirée plays out in the background, its participants occasionally staring into the lens as well but never upstaging José’s centrality in the frame. It’s a droll taunt on de Oliveira’s part, for such celebratory energy will quickly dissipate from the film, leaving only José’s long-faced stoicism and obstinate gaze in a series of heady exchanges in dignified settings. Augusto is a man of ideas, his only gratification seemingly found in cerebral discourse, and he surrounds himself with austere types who can meet him on his pedestal. In this, he has a perfect foil in Camilo Castelo Branco (Mário Barroso), the fictional proxy of the real-life novelist behind Doomed Love’s source material, and a man whose capacity for pontification on human nature knows no bounds.

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Francisca’s central conflict is the competition between Camilo and José over the heart of Fanny (Teresa Menezes), though to say so is misleading, since they conduct this sparring match almost entirely outside the company of the lady in question, and because in their vehement defenses of their own positions, they betray an absolute ignorance to the very nature of romantic partnership. Camilo openly confesses to pursuing Fanny for sport even as he seems to harbor deeper, unaddressed feelings, while José feigns a more earnest approach, even as his catalyzing motive ultimately amounts to one-upmanship. They dictate their dialectics in pokerfaced monotone, rarely stopping for reflection or deliberation. There’s an understated comedy in all of this, and on rare occasion de Oliveira even lets it blossom into absurdity, such as in a scene where José enters Camilo’s polished writing quarters on horseback, unresponsive to the protests of an exasperated housemaid.

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Filming in immaculately dressed and lit rooms and separating his single-take sequences with matter-of-fact title cards that address, often with subtle wit, the actions about to take place, de Oliveira presents Francisca’s narrative progression as something of a foregone conclusion. The experience of watching the film feels akin to surveying a series of museum paintings and periodically pausing to digest the museum label beneath them; at times, de Oliveira will even play a scene twice, back-to-back, from two different angles, reinforcing the stuck-in-time nature of the storytelling. In the place of narrative transformation and suspense is a deadpan air of judgment that recalls the amused omniscience of Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of Enlightenment-era narcissism, Barry Lyndon, which charts another roguish gentleman trying to rise above his station via a marital engagement. But where Kubrick’s monumental tragicomedy emphasizes class ascension and cultural infiltration (with Lyndon as an Irish racketeer fudging his way to clout in England), Francisca locates within José and Camilo’s sustained feud the embattled character of a Portugal torn between its past as an absolutist empire, embodied by Camilo’s unquestioning allegiance to the idea of natural law, and its future as a liberal constitutional monarchy, expressed in José pretensions to romantic free will as well as his frequent sojourns to Oporto, then the center of Portuguese progressivism.

Such specific, archaic political matters inform and deepen the film’s dialogue, but they ultimately recede as the film focuses increasingly on spiritual ruin. “The soul is an addiction,” Fanny dispassionately suggests when first approached by Camilo early in the film, and she’ll feel the pangs of withdrawal later when she and José, now unhappily wedded, suffer under the demands of domestic life and the relentless psychological harassment of Camilo, who takes every opportunity to try to breed doubt and despair in the couple. Though José’s shown to be an incompetent lover—most amusingly in an evening walk in the woods that leads to a swampy, shadowy dead end—the union has stirred something real and heavy within both himself and his companion, and the film’s funereal final act watches in magisterial long takes as their souls gradually escape their bodies, precipitating their eventual demises.

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A series of events this dour would normally cry out for melodramatic treatment, but Francisca never targets the tear ducts. Instead, de Oliveira captures a haunting sense of loss that has less to do with José or Fanny’s specific tailspin than with a larger failing or absence in Portuguese society. In Francisca, all the rationalizing and antagonizing and categorizing and philosophizing proffered by José, Camilo, and their upper-crust compatriots comes at the expense of any real feeling, or anything spontaneous, in their lives. That de Oliveira’s style echoes that debilitating rigidity is to some extent the filmmaker’s recognition of himself in that self-defeating mentality, or at least of the aristocracy that bred him. To squander time and energy on trivial matters is a tragedy perhaps greater than death, de Oliveira suggests, and Francisca delivers this truth with shrewd frankness and a wry smirk.

Francisca is now available from Grasshopper Film.

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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