One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
God’s Comedy (João César Monteiro, 1995).
João César Monteiro made 21 films from his debut in 1969 until his death in 2003, from his early interpretations of Portuguese folklore and turning inward for the self-mythologization of his late period. His work sparked international acclaim and intense domestic controversy, evincing a deep-seated disdain for life perpetually contending with a stubborn passion for beauty—a struggle he could localize only in his own singular figure as he approached the end of his life. João de Deus, his on-screen persona for three films produced between 1989 and 1999, resembles nothing so much as a praying mantis. Long of arm, face, and torso, his body balances a protuberant skull in which two green pools of eyes are set grossly out of proportion. Like the mantis, though his hyperactive sexuality is tied to death, he remains in a perpetual state of genuflection before divinity.
Formerly homeless, briefly institutionalized, in God’s Comedy (1995), João finds himself managing an ice cream parlor, Paraíso do Gelado. As ever, he pursues the young Lusitanian women around him with a fervor approaching religiosity. Following a hiring interview with one such woman, Rosarinho, in front of the parlor’s rain-battered windows, Monteiro cuts to a symmetrical medium shot in João’s house. Richard Wagner’s “Mild und leise,” the finale of Tristan und Isolde wherein Isolde reunites with Tristan in death, plays as João sits facing the camera between two French doors. Rosarinho enters, clad now in a one-piece bathing suit, and stretches out face down on the massage-table-cum-altar in front of João.
João’s description of his work as confectioner could double as a description of his highly developed sexuality: “the search for the splendiferous, perhaps unattainable flavor of flavors.” From scene to scene his desire wafts him across a Bataille-esque daisy chain of shifting, visually contiguous motifs, from vapor to water to milk to ice cream.1 Isolde’s deathly aria, called “Verklärung” (Transfiguration) by Wagner, might describe the final change of states. João rises with the swell of the music, spreading his arms as if conducting. Skipping along the chain, the previous scene’s precipitation has now flooded into an imaginary lake. Rosarinho commences a pantomimed breaststroke below him. Motionless for the scene’s duration, the camera neither facilitates nor disrupts the fantasy. João traces her backside at an inch’s remove and leans into her before casting himself back in denial of this ecstasy. As with the mantis, for João, consummation is death. When he finally succumbs to the temptation of touch, Rosarinho goes still. In the final frame, João kneels beside her, in reverence of his elusive fantasy, which has evaporated in his hands. We cut to Rosarinho in a swimming pool.
The “Mild und leise” shot relates God’s Comedy in seven minutes. Either an unreconstructed pervert or, as he would have it, “a free man who has the courage in a country of mediocrities to exalt life,” João pursues the shifting signposts of his desire into and out of paradise. The boundary between comedy and tragedy, pain and ecstasy, sacred and profane can be razor-thin. Of João’s “flavor of flavors,” one French taster reports: “Monsieur, your ice is shit.”
- François Bovier and Cédric Fluckiger, “Fétiches et fétichisme, au nom de Dieu.” Décadrages 10 (2007): 9-24. ↩