In Sandro Aguilar’s 2015 short film, Undisclosed Recipients, two lovers meet at the Paredes de Coura Festival in Portugal. The night is a liquid black, lights and faces and bodies moving through the space. There’s a kiss, then another. It’s a film of darkness and desire, a deepening lust that gives way to catharsis. For a moment, lovers become one, the overwhelming darkness giving way to a feeling of connection. Like many of Aguilar’s works, such as Mariphasa and Armour, Undisclosed Recipients takes place at night — where the line between the real and imagined is obscured.
In First Person Plural, Aguilar’s latest film, his characters step into the light, but they’re still moving through a dream. A figure in a suit, their face hidden by a sheer white cover, traverses a maximalist space that brims with hints of a deep love. He writes a letter, the light from a music box illuminating the blank canvas of his covered visage. Even while solitary, the figure evokes René Magritte’s painting The Lovers II, a surreal image of two lovers kissing beyond their veils — intimately connected but deeply alienated.
As lovers meet for the first time in First Person Plural, Irene (Isabel Abreu), pulls up the veil of her husband, Mateus (Albano Jerónimo). They kiss. Their voices are deep, relaxed, and sensual. We aren’t in a real world, but a heightened one, ruled by the drowsy influences of sickness. The movie moves in waves of emotion: melancholy and whimsy, security and uncertainty, capturing a sense of familiar relationships still touched with unknowability. Wavering between romanticism and deep loneliness, the film uses absurdism and dream logic to interrupt the comfort of modern life.
Although its narrative is about a couple on vacation with their teenage son, First Person Plural is built less on narrative incident than it is on sensations. The frame often overflows with things — plants, objects, trinkets — and its overwhelming fullness inspires a hyperrealism in tension with the film’s aloof structure and characters. Cinematographer Rui Xavier’s camera moves softly, with a languid smoothness that doesn’t inspire clarity so much as it does a passive strangeness. The film builds on this movement with a quietly romantic score, a whispering soundscape, and indulges in slow crossfades that reinforce a sense of dreaming.
As we move through the space, it becomes more tangled, like a kudzu vine overtaking an environment. Intentions, traumas, and desires become increasingly confused with one another, and the relations between different characters more complicated and uncertain. Rather than moving toward clarity, First Person Plural moves away from it. If we begin the film with a sense that, despite our connections with one another through blood or love, we are all on our own solitary planet, the depth of that loneliness becomes complicated by the tightening grip of the weed that overtakes and overwhelms our existence. The film’s atmosphere, then, gives the sensation of being strangled. Despite romantic and comedic interludes, the movie deepens towards a profound, alienating melancholia. Characters often speak of various ailments and sickness; the side effects of vaccines, tumours, and disappointments. It’s as if the line that separates the interior world from the surfaces of the exterior has been irreparably broken, as the inner thoughts flow outward and the poisons of the surface world flow inward.
There are often moments here that the audience can feel as though the film is escaping them, and if First Person Plural maintains interest throughout, it’s largely due to the performance of Albano Jerónimo. His performance as Mateus is spontaneous and unpredictable, charming and frightening in turns, as he seems more and less human than anyone else in the film. In one scene, as a phone is ringing, he becomes entranced by his own reflection. He blows hair out of his face. He seems adrift and defamiliarized, as if he’s unsure of his own place in the world. Not long afterward, as his son comes to the door, Mateus behaves once again as if he’s in front of a mirror. As the two of them speak, he reaches out to touch his reflection, increasingly unsure of his own reality. One even senses that he’s moving through an afterlife, as if he’s long crumbled under the weight of history.
The pleasure of his performance seems rooted in the heart of the film’s tension: how do we find meaning and connection in the modern world? Set in a bourgeois environment heavy with the echoes of colonialism, dictatorship, and privilege, the movie interrupts and subverts expectations. The absurdism undercuts the comfort of the characters’ lives, exposing the empty satisfaction of their existence. Their humanity isn’t exposed through their materialism or conformity, but through their playfulness and strangeness. First Person Plural captures a sense of alienation endemic to modern life, while also undercutting it by revealing through a sense of play, pleasure, and ambiguity the inventiveness of the human spirit.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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