NYFF '24: Portuguese pastoral poetry in "Fire of Wind"

by Cláudio Alves

The first thing one notices about Marta Mateus' feature debut, Fire of Wind, is its striking look. A vineyard extends as far as the eye can see and the camera gobbles up every detail, crisp and razor-sharp in that way digital filmmaking so often is. The visual style is almost aggressive in how much texture it seeks to pack into every shot, a spin on haptic cinema that ensures the spectator considers each line in the grapevine and the rustle of plump windswept leaf. You can almost count the blades of dry grass below, far into the distance, as there's no artful shallow focus here, no anamorphic distortion or other trendy affectations of the cinematic image. It looks like little else out there – not even the films of Fire of Wind producer Pedro Costa...

Thematically, such photographic choices signal that, for all that Fire of Wind is a visual poem, it's one written in plain speech, even blunt, though rarely to the point. It's also painterly, concerned with the variations of light across the landscape, how the sky is a swath of bottomless blue with clouds fluffed up in variations of shadow and sunkiss gold. Moreover, the level of detail and color contrast takes one back to pictorial art, where such intensity defies the workings of the human eye, looking farther and in more substantial resolution than anyone's gaze could ever do. It documents everything, yet it also flattens planes.

The effect is breathtaking, on the verge of overwhelming, testing the limits of the medium even before Fire of Wind leaves its grape-picking prologue. But after exploring all these wonders Mateus and co-cinematographer Vítor Carvalho have in store, some basic summary or synopsis might be necessary. For clarity's sake, if nothing else. In 72 minutes, the film considers a group of workers during the harvest, when a young girl cuts herself and spills blood on the land. Whether by coincidence or the consequences presaged by folkloric beliefs, disaster ensues. A black bull is on the loose, furious and out for blood.

And so it goes, taking many lives with its horns and driving the survivors up the trees, climbing for survival and a safe place. It's a Portuguese Cujo with a bovine twist. Only, Mateus isn't interested in the horror of wait and mortal peril. Instead, she takes the nightmare, depurates and dries it out in the sun, using that state of affairs to incur the sharing of stories and dreams, personal artifacts and old photographs. Through this, aided by the land's material memory, time seems to work backward, taking the film through a slow cinema hallucination of Portuguese history and anti-fascist, anti-war, pro-proletariat rhetoric. Specifically, it reflects on a national past embodied within the vistas of Alentejo, one of the country's poorest regions. 

There are visions of the fascist dictatorship, of the Colonial wars and World War I veterans, peasant poverty against the wealth of those who own the land, even back to times of monarchy. And then the ghosts come out at night, shadows black under silver moonlight. In this and other ways, Fire of Wind seems as indebted to the tradition of rural realist painting as to the Symbolist theater of French influence, typified by such names as Eugénio de Castro e António Nobre. But don't be fooled by these references. The exercise is deeply personal, too, mixing Mateus' generational histories with those of the non-actors in front of the camera, including Maria Catarina Sapata, who also stars in the director's previous short - 2017's Barbs, Wastelands.

The project is a collaboration and a collage. It's a séance that sees the filmmaker's own son portraying their ancestor who lost an eye in World War I and now comes back, a romantic spirit that walks with dawn. He speaks of his injury, but the face presented to us is immaculate. Furthermore, the soldier is still full of hope for a dead man, wanting to see his son again. As shown in such passages, Fire of Wind exemplifies a rare tenderness and reaches for pathos one wouldn't expect from such cerebral arthouse fare. Sometimes, it's not even the resurrection of those who are gone. Sometimes, all you need is a gentle wish for better days from the desperate and disposed.

In the darkest hours of night, old hands arrange an "espiga" – a collection of dried wheat and flowers, tokens from the natural world that, when joined, ask the fates for bread, peace, health, gold, and love, for survival and protection. In the face of death by a raging bull and the remembrance of those left behind, such rite for future life rings with incredible hope. And then you see a son begging his dying father to stay, even as blood pools on the ground. And the ghostly war widows speak in their disaffected tones, straight out of a Pasolini fable, alienating but no less laden with sorrow. The mystical is mundane, the presentation theatrical. Still, the feeling hits hard, profound. 

Believe it or not, there's also humor in this bizarre cinematic edifice. It's of the stone-faced variety, as mired in oddities and national specificity as the rest of the text. Consider the sight of one of the grape-pickers reading a newspaper from fascist times proclaiming that "The People Are No Longer Afraid," all while he stays sat high on the branches, fearful that he'll be gored by the waiting ox. Shortly after, there's a spectral gravedigger setting up holes for the misfortunate to rest and decay. Oh, and all the ghosts seem to harken for a cigarette, stealing from the freshly deceased or slowly dying. Shameless specters, they are, some manifestation of gallows humor with a metaphysical dimension. 

Fire of Wind risks inscrutability with these peculiarities and big swings, allusions to António Salazar's autocratic rule and other points of 20th-century Portuguese history. But through it all, the film remains engaging. Every image invites studious examination, it spellbinds and evades tedium. Still unconvinced? Then, you may go down the path of epicurean surrender to its audiovisual pleasures and stay there, unconcerned with text, themes, or theory. The picture is beautiful enough for that. It's also a polyvalent and polysemic piece, slippery cinema elevated to formalist high art with an outspoken political intent. That last facet isn't always the most coherent, and one wishes it relied less on direct quotation. Nevertheless, one failing isn't enough to bring the whole thing down. Fire of Wind stands proud and proudly Portuguese, walking between ethnography and myth, between the personal and the pamphlet and the poem. It's a remarkable debut that whets the appetite for whatever Marta Mateus does next.

Fire of Wind premiered in the main competition at Locarno and later played in the NYFF Currents section.