There are so many things about Green’s movie that strain the viewer’s credulity: the character Julie de Hauranne (played with careful understatement by Leonor Baldaque) can speak idiomatically fluent urban Portuguese (via her mother) even though she grew up in Paris and has never been to Lisbon; after Julie inadvertently convinces a spiritually lost aristocrat not to commit suicide, he can then say they don’t need a candelabra to see while wandering through his crumbling estate house—it has no electricity—because she is “the light”; the too well-dressed and well-fed “orphan” she encounters in the streets is supposedly six years old but looks—and acts—eleven or twelve; and then there’s the professional fado ensemble in full kit just waiting to serenade Julie ( and the viewer) in an empty afternoon bar as we/she wander Lisbon, spiritual puppets deep in thought.

Green’s movie unfolds like a controlled dream: a (hopefully!) intended oxymoron whose effect is strengthened by the deliberate ‘knowing’ gaze of each character towards the camera/viewer at key points in the movie—a typical Green cinematic mannerism. We are placed, in this real/unreal dream world, on the edge of many possibilities: satire, melodrama, farce, tragedy, dogmatic morality play, travelogue, soap opera, lyrical romance, philosophical/religious post-modernist debate, outré failed movie.

The faux realism of the mise en scène exacerbates this ambiguity, until the viewer is not sure whether to be captivated by the lush romanticism of the fado songs and the obvious references to Lisbon as a source of spiritual revelation, or to laugh—or gag (expecting a hack from the Lisbon Travel Bureau to leap out and offer two-for-one weekends of “personal discovery” at a local hotel with a free visit from a nun-Saint thrown in).

Can a movie that tries to do all these things work? Especially given the absence of physical drama (the earnest characters move like deconstructed zombies) amidst the clichés of emphasized stares and clattering shoe close-ups on the brickwork roads.

Yes, I think it can. I think it does.

There is something unquantifiable in this movie, something that transcends its seemingly almost amateur parts to reach an ineffable state in which the viewer (at least this viewer) willingly—even eagerly—discards all the otherwise convincing signs encouraging disbelief in Green’s art. Maybe it’s the staged fado songs, which are mesmeric. Maybe it’s the prescient ‘silences’ of wind and sea (as opposed to techno-urban Lisbon) as the main character wanders the city. Maybe it’s the careful, almost static long straight shots and portrait close-ups that allow us to sense immanence in the commonplace details of our lives, the lives of others, and in the rest of the physical world. Maybe it’s the wry wit throughout—Green is an Antonioni with a sense of humour (something that would have done Antonioni good).

Or maybe it’s the need of this viewer to like anything that eschews the drugstore of Hollywood (although I would hope my critical gaze is more serious than that).

Finally, it doesn’t matter what particular personal revelations the characters achieve; they are anyway only one step away from being Symbols rather than real people. What’s at work here is cinema magic that allows us to believe that if we pay very careful attention to the mundane particularity of the world around us—which this movie does (the exquisite and precise details in each shot are more important than the narrative process of the characters)—we can learn through this something valuable about ourselves. For each of us, that will be different and yet essentially the same. When Julie tells the nun that being an actress allows her to tell the truth through creating something unreal, the nun answers that this is also God’s intention in the creation of the world.

When I walk away from a movie and come back to the ‘outside’ world feeling that I have brought something real and important with me from the imaginative journey, something insubstantial yet lingering, I count that film a success. I liked ‘A Religiosa Portuguesa.’