The Portuguese Nun
Dec 03 - Dec 09, 2010
(Eugene Green, Portugal/France, 2009, 35mm, 127 min)
Seattle premiere!
(Please note updated showtimes)
In this highly stylized, subtly funny and gradually mesmerizing composition, director Eugene Green (Pont des Arts) presents Julie de Hauranne (Leonor Baldaque), a young French actress of Portuguese descent. She comes to Lisbon to shoot a movie adaptation of the 17th-century epistolary novel Letters from a Portuguese Nun, and to learn about life, love and the possibility of choosing one’s destiny. Green, whose work is described by Christoph Huber as “playful but never frivolous,” builds through thoughtful juxtaposition and paradox.
Julie is a lusty atheist who says, “I am an actress, I try to show the truth through unreal things." She is irresistibly drawn to a nun who, with intensity equal to Julie’s, comes to pray for hours in a chapel. Green lets full performances of fado punctuate Nun's formally composed conversations, filmed straight into the actor’s gaze. His loving and minimalist portrait of Lisbon employs complex interweaving of literary and cinematic references, notably in homage to cinematic luminary Manoel de Oliveria.
An official selection at the 2009 BFI London Film Festival, and described as the top film you probably missed in 2009 by the Guardian, now is your chance to see this poignant, irresistible gem.
"This is tourism of an especially exalted kind, saturated with literary and historical references and infused with a melancholy intensity that is both seductive and strange." —NY Times
This is a deadpan reverie on love and faith, film and life… it's also impishly poetic and singularly moving” —The Guardian (UK)
Read an interview with director Eugene Green
Watch the trailer:
