Thirty-One Means Trouble

Trinta e um

Portugal

2002

19 Min

Black and White

1.66:1

Portuguese

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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CAST Mariana Ricardo, Nuno Oliveira

ED João Nicolau

Synopsis

“This is the way you hold the racket to play a forehand. Just move your arm back, the left shoulder facing the ball, step forward with your left foot, hitting the ball.” —O Som e a Fúria

With some slight surrealism, a certain indolent eroticism, and the brutal background of class struggle (as in the early Pasolini), 31 (the number of the tennis court from which the leading couple embarks on an adventure, with just a supermarket cart filled with tennis balls as their luggage) establishes some improbable connections on the way (between The Wizard of Oz and the end of the Portuguese dictatorship; between silent movies and the exuberant soundtracks made in India) to sketch, perhaps, a critique of another probable and fertile relation: the one between cinema and history. —BAFICI 2009

Director

Miguel Gomes

Miguel Gomes (b. 1972) began first as a film critic before directing a series of refreshingly eccentric short films that revealed his innate talents as a sensual visual stylist interested in an intensely image based narrative in which music plays an equal role to dialogue. Gomes’ early “musical comedies” offer important keys to his feature films by revealing the important inspiration of both musical cinema and the silent film to his uniquely playful and imaginative approach to narrative. The unique energy and puckish charm of Gomes’ little known debut, the Alice in Wonderland-meets-Jacque Rivette narrative puzzle, The Face That You Deserve, took the ludic tendencies of his cinema to a furthest extreme. The festival favorite My Beloved Month of August turned a new and important direction by responding to the “post-documentary” mode of innovative and unclassifiable non-fiction cinema championed by Costa and defined earlier by pioneering works such as Oliveira’s Rite of Spring (1963… read more