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Maria e as Outras, or the Portuguese Sex and the City
I had a chance of watching Maria e as Outras on DVD, a Portuguese film released in 2004.
Maria e as Outras tells us the story of 3 young women and their difficulties with love and life.
The main character, Maria, played by Catarina Furtado on the photo, works in marketing and lives in Oporto. When she travels to Lisboa for a cousin's wedding, her father has a stroke that makes her extend her stay at his house. She does not have a steady boyfriend, but dates quite a bit. The constants in her life are her mother, with whom she has a conflictuous relationship, and an online male friend with whom she chats regularly on Messenger. A funny note to the male nurse she hires to help with her father. We do not see him often but when we do, he is sleeping! Also, the way he looks... hardly a nurse anyone would hire!
Joana, one of the "outras" (others), is a hairdresser who also dates as much as she can, although later in the film we find one painful secret from her past that may be causes her erractic love life. Isilda is a doctor and she is involved in a steady relationship with another doctor, but when he wants to move away from the city and settle in a more rural area, she turns him down, re-thinks her decision and ultimately looses him.
This film is great in that it portrays a certain Portuguese generation of women and their aspirations and fears. The two supporting actresses, playing Isilda and Joana, do a great job and are convincing characters.
Maria, on the other hand, is too vague and too removed from us. We never get to understand entirely what her feelings are and so we fail to feel more empathy towards her. Other downfalls include: photography (a real shame that this failed: Lisbon, Oporto and even other areas of the country are poorly portrayed), the dialogues are uneven (sometimes good, sometimes dull) and particularly the ending of the film was for me a big deception and disappointment. The main character never unveils herself, we never get to know her and that is the main frustration of the film and its ending.
Overall, Maria e as Outras is worth watching. It is light and entertaining and at the same time almost a documentary about Portuguese life today. Interesting enough, José de Sá Caetano the director, is not such a young man anymore. His technical skills were learned at the BBC in London. Having returned to Portugal to become a director, his film manages to be more uptodate than most, a movie to see on any rainy evening.
Official site here.