Damned Summer / Verão Danado
Gothenburg
Sat 30 Sep
19:30 — Hagabion
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PRODUCTION YEAR: 2017
GENRE: Fiction
DIRECTOR: Pedro Cabeleira
COUNTRY: Portugal
FILM DURATION: 128 min
AGE LIMIT: 15
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Idling afternoons, drugs, heartbreaks, psychedelic moods immersed in music. An adrenaline rush with Lisbon as the backdrop of a drifting youth.
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LANGUAGE: Portuguese
SUBTITLES: English
Review
Is this a film about a specific period of time, or a portrait of a particular generation?
Set around the time when Portugal was first starting to come around a severe economic depression, that took a heavy toll in the younger generations, a case can be argued that it is both at the same time. Yet, many aspects contribute to also look at Verão Danado (Damned Summer, 2017), Pedro Cabeleira’s first feature, as a timeless portrait of youth’s malaises in search for meaning, deeper connections or signs of a hopeful future.
Ultimately, this leads to an exercise in portraying an obsession with hedonism, as a replacement for an envisioned lack of purpose, something that occupies the days because it looks like there isn’t anything else.
The film shows us a few hours in the life of Chico and his group of friends, as he navigates a series of social encounters (playing football, a meetup in the park, a dinner with friends, a night out) in which he is constantly looking for making a meaningful connection to new people, acting as a proxy or a tabula rasa which asks questions more than reveals anything about himself, but also while constantly getting lost on his own alienation, a kind of Sisyphus of elusiveness, searching for a new high only to come down.
The film is beautifully shot by Cabeleira’s director of photography, the filmmaker Leoner Teles, mainly as a sensory and dreamy series of nightlife landscapes, a surreal but paradoxically realistic representation of the sense of not understanding if something is happening or not.
The film threads a thin line between being in love with its characters, and depicting their void and hedonism as sympathetic, rather than critical.
At times, it’s an extremely subjective experience as it locks us out, and then asks us to come in, and the web of fleeting characters around our protagonist don’t stay too long, floating in the film’s ether.
The result is a captivating experience, especially because of its unpredictability, but also because of a sense of dread, as the day - which will be followed by the inevitable hangover - threatens to come to an end.
João Araújo
À pala de Walsh