35mm

Francisca

Manoel de Oliveira

Camilo Castelo Branco, the author of the novel from which Oliveira adapted Doomed Love, emerged as a character in the director’s next film—a sinister portrait of a mutually destructive love affair with surprising connections to Oliveira’s own family history.

DIRECTOR
Manoel de Oliveira
YEAR
1981
COUNTRY
Portugal
RUNTIME
166 minutes
LANGUAGE
Portuguese with English subtitles
FORMAT
35mm

Camilo Castelo Branco, the author of the novel from which Oliveira adapted Doomed Love, emerged as a character in the director’s next film—a sinister, absorbing portrait of a mutually destructive love affair. Oliveira’s source text for Francisca was a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, whose work he’d later adapt twice more. The book’s retelling of a troubled passage in Camilo’s life—his friend José Augusto (Diogo Dória) embarked on a perverse game of marital cat and mouse with Francisca (Teresa Menezes), the woman the novelist loved—led Oliveira to new levels of stylistic and formal imagination. (It helped that his wife, a distant relative of the historical Francisca, gave him access to a cache of the woman’s letters.) With its elaborate title cards, abundance of shots in which the action is oriented directly toward the camera, gloomy interiors, and show-stopping gala set-pieces, Francisca is an exacting, sumptuous, and utterly inimitable cinematic experience, and one of Oliveira’s crowning achievements.

Francisca
Francisca

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