It all begins as a ghost story in Portuguese filmmaker João Rosas’ feature debut The Luminous Life. Said ghost is a nameless woman who, as his best friend attests to protagonist Nicolau (played by Rosas’ long-time collaborator Francisco Melo), bears striking resemblance to his former girlfriend Inês (Margarida Dias). As would seem fitting, this coveted doppelganger is a true cinephile, and thus allows for several seemingly chance encounters at Lisbon’s Cinemateca — though Nicolau’s presence, for the most part, appears to go by unnoticed. At which point you might wonder whether it’s not perhaps Nicolau who’s the “ghost” of Rosas’ story. This, at least, is what his mother calls the 24-year-old, whose crackerjack roaming through Lisbon’s manifold nooks and crannies attends rather to the gathering than the leaving of impressions.
Nicolau, in other words, is much more of a listener than a talker, and — far from concealing his drifting probings — quite deliberately so. The conceit of a young male protagonist as chiefly passive observer marks no novelty in cinema history, nor, mind you, in Rosas’ own filmography. Still, there is something undeniably fresh about the Lisbon native’s approach. For while, as far as fiction is concerned, The Luminous Life may be Rosas’ first feature-length outing, it, in the same way, continues a journey started in 2012 with the half-hour short film Entrecampos. There, we follow a young girl called Mariana (Francisca Alarcao), who moves with her father to the Portuguese capital and promptly gets lost several times. In school, the 11-year-old makes the acquaintance of Nicolau (likewise played by Francisco Melo), a somewhat speech-impaired yet precocious coeval who, together with his brother Simão — his romantic sage — takes Mariana under their wing.
Since this first encounter, Rosas promoted Melo to lead status, having him reappear in two other shorts: Maria do Mar (2015), which documents a sexual awakening of sorts, and Catavento (2019), which sees Mariana back as Nicolau’s childhood friend while the 18-year-old’s mind oscillates between remorse over the fact that he never made it to Lisbon’s art academy and his grasping for guidance for his imminent, college-related life decisions. Reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s long-term projects such as Boyhood, the Before series, and the currently worked-on 20-year project Merrily We Roll Along or Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle, we see Nicolau and his friends grow over more than a decade. There is continuity in that, manifest in subtle echoes: in the first two films, Nicolau wears Sesame Street t-shirts; in Maria do Mar and again The Luminous Life, we see him perched on the higher branches of a tree, and by Catavento, the David Bowie poster hanging on his bedroom wall has become a fixture when we revisit him now, at 24. And as if determined to believe in the palmistry-inclined young woman at the very end of Catavento, who, glimpsing an expert look, asserted that his “life line” coincide with his “love line,” Nicolau still acts hopelessly romantic, always ready for the go-for-broke gesture that will bring him together with the love of his life.
But where there is continuity, there is change, too. For one, the Nicolau of The Luminous Life seems changed compared to previous films, which, of course, makes all the sense in the world given that we heretofore met him during his most formative years. Still, the first time we meet him as cheeky 11-year-old in Entrecampos, there is some internalized machismo in him when he calls his later friend Mariana “baby,” a low-dose machismo that is retained in the ensuing short films. For another, the notion of change is detectable on the narrative level, with the initial ghost story that has Nicolau follow the Inês lookalike transitioning into a workplace comedy of sorts, before ultimately revealing itself to be a coming-of-age romance. The opening section — a cross rhyme, if you will, with the second short, in which we see the awestruck then-14-year old trailing behind the eponymous Maria — eerily evokes José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia, though Rosas grants the somewhat oneiric scenery the needed humor. During a projection of Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March, Nicolau’s efforts finally seem to pay off, when, for a moment, the mysterious woman’s hand finds his in the dark and grips it tightly. But as soon as the long-awaited moment arises, which Rosas skillfully builds up to through rhythmically employed detail shots, close-ups, and glimpses into the black-and-white romantic drama and the pianist that accompanies it, the warm blanket that has characters and audience alike cozily enveloped gets yanked away. Suddenly, the “luminous life” reenters with the light switch on, casting a final — if indirect — look from the Inês reincarnation toward Nicolau before leaving the room. The invited film expert who solely speaks in Bresson quotes now approaches Nicolau, dispensing one of the French master’s wisdoms: “A thing that has failed can, if you change its place, be a thing that has come off.”
Strange as it may sound, this encounter has a sobering effect on Nicolau, one that releases him from his obsessive spell and furthermore proves Rosas’ preference for horizontal over vertical storytelling. By decentralizing this short period — by relegating it to a mere episode — Rosas grants his feature debut a suggestion of openness, allowing for the kind of narrative deviation that can be found in the work of Hispanic filmmakers Rodrigo Moreno or Nicolás Pereda. His protagonist henceforth finds out about his mother’s affair with another man, moves out into a shared flat with two young women a couple years his senior, takes on a job at a stationery store and, toward the end, projects himself into a future outside of Lisbon, potentially in France. Yet neither of these developments taps into the weightiness one might expect, nor does the script fall prey to common dramaturgical shortcuts such as antagonisms or forced conflict. Much in the vein of Bas Devos or, say, Apichatpong, Rosas’ cinema is conflictless in its most intuitive sense. Never, for instance, do we see Nicolau antagonize his mother for her infidelity; the ensuing separation of his parents instead leads to a rapprochement with his father, onto whom the separation imposes thorough introspection.
Cinema, in the conception of João Rosas, thus always holds the potential for new encounters — with places, with theory, but above all with people. “Community,” the director told the audience on the stage of the Pupp Cinema at Karlovy Vary, where the film had its international premiere, “community is more and more important to me — politically but also aesthetically.” And “before, behind and beyond the camera,” one might want to add, for while Rosas’ penchant for extensive ensembles and wide-spanning character constellations is obvious — with some of them only originating as he goes about casting and pre-production — The Luminous Life could indeed be a “generational touchstone for curious younger cinephiles,” as Variety’s Guy Lodge puts it. Those who find these words a little too lofty will nevertheless be reminded of the communal force of cinema, and struck by the notion that the people we are upon entering the theater are rarely quite the same as those who leave it.
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