Today, in Portugal, the country celebrated 115 years since the monarchy fell and its first Republic came into being. Across the Atlantic, at the New York Film Festival, there was another celebration of sorts as Pedro Pinho's I Only Rest In the Storm had its North American premiere. This three-and-a-half-hour oddball drama cum political comedy is one of the best Portuguese films of the season, drunk with playfulness and an audacious spirit to the point of euphoria. At Cannes, Cleo Diára won the Best Actress prize from the Un Certain Regard section, a well-deserved honor for what feels like a star-making turn. At its best, her work suggests an anticolonial variation on the Old Hollywood screwball heroine, complete with constant outfit changes, a barnburner of a monologue, and a starring role in the cinematic year's most entrancing sex scene…
I Only Rest In the Storm, whose Portuguese title more accurately translates to The Laughter and the Knife, starts in the middle of a lunatic's journey across the desert. He's Sérgio, a Portuguese environmental engineer driving from Lisbon to Guinea-Bissau, recently hired to research a building project that'll see a European company slash a highway through the West African landscape. Indeed, the sheer grandeur of the place dictates the film's opening, all elliptical cuts and haunting wide shots, images of white salted earth cracking open while strumming streams anticipate the narrative's relaxed rhythms going forward.
From early on, Pinho shows interest in exploring the everyday theaters of absurdity that occur in a putative postcolonial world still reeling from the realities of our colonial history. Pay attention as this white man and a local try to understand each other when neither speaks the other's language. They reach a compromise of broken Spanish, suggesting a linguistic no man's land of international communication, imperfect and shambolic. It's perverse how, like every other power dynamic in sight, it always comes back to European influence, hegemony. Why are all these lingua francas from the so-called Old Continent? The answer is written in blood.
Not that the film is ready to verbalize its points so soon. Nevertheless, every image carries with it a meaning, common to most Portuguese reckonings with its colonial past on the big screen, from Gomes' Tabu and Grand Tour to this year's Oscar submission Banzo – we don't belong here, and here does not belong to us. The shots of Sérgio's car navigating the asphalt river of a road, across the waves of windswept sand, suggest a place that's primordially alive, in active rejection of this stranger who floats above it, a pale, ghost-like figure. The unexpected warga ritual, a touch of the oneiric, only furthers the vision of Alice trampling lost through Wonderland.
From the middle of nowhere, the film moves to a land imagined by neo-colonial liberalism, loaded with its hypocrisies, permeated with capitalistic interests, as capitalism is colonialism's closest sibling. Sérgio's scenes plop onto the screen awkwardly, often losing the camera's attention and the microphone's too. Several moments will seek parallel conversations, sometimes finding dialogues of such utter emptiness that you can't help but laugh. Still, for farce, this white man who still smells like airport is your best bet as he suffers from foot-in-mouth disease, terminal white savior complex, enough self-awareness to know when he's wrong but not enough wit to talk his way out of it.
Through text and apparent improvisation, I Only Rest in the Storm features numerous conversations about race and colonialism, but it doesn't feel didactic or especially prescriptive. Mainly because these scenes sound like real interactions held between people who feel passionately about these ideas they live in the flesh, one way or another. It's similar to the political rhetoric and leftist theory that dominate much of the director's Nothing Factory. Like in that neorealist musical, Pinho relies on a humanistic honesty that makes every second about the people contained within the frame, rather than a lecture directed toward the audience. We're invited to participate silently, but the dialogue is not merely for our education and potential betterment.
It helps that neither Pinho nor his collaborators regard Blackness as a monolith, much less the experience of colonized peoples from different parts of the world. This approach may feel insular, but it's actually the opposite, thanks to the playfulness of form, the fluidity of mood, and the sensuality of its sensibilities. Even when the story maroons Sérgio on a hostile outpost where racial hierarchies go so far as defining who has access to drinking water, there's a sense of caricature elided. A satire this may be, but it's not a political cartoon drawn in broad strokes. Indeed, the predilection for long scenes and long takes leads to a transmuting quality, where something might start as tragedy and end as circus.
In some ways, the film embodies Sérgio's tricky self-awareness, as it seems intent on expanding its vision beyond him, acknowledging that the story at hand needs to include perspectives outside whiteness. And so, I Only Rest in the Storm gets two co-protagonists, Gui and Diara – along with Sérgio Coragem as Sérgio, Jonathan Guilherme and Cleo Diára share a name with the fictional figures they're playing. We meet the former through the camera following behind with an electric pep in its step, breaking with the formal conventions established so far. Gui is a Brazilian expat living in Guinea-Bissau, queer as fuck and declaratively fluid just like the film they're blessing with their presence.
Diara has a more piecemeal introduction, appearing first as a local party girl glimpsed by Sérgio as she enjoys a night of revelry, a shimmering siren among men. Later, she'll literally barge running into his life and redirect its stream. We'll also find her independently of the engineer, as if transplanted from what feels like a different film with a distinct tone of its own and a styling that captures the West African middle point between old-school screwball glamour and Brigitte Lin in Chungking Express. At times, she feels like the embodiment of chaos, and, like Gui, her very presence influences the camera into adopting a warm eroticism in how it regards bodies and reflects the characters' gazes.
And then there's the sex itself. A first scene of this ilk, between Sérgio and a prostitute, introduces a frankness that's so uncommon in contemporary filmmaking as to feel like another cinema transmitted from a parallel universe. Later on, a bisexual threesome flirts with pornographic spectacle and Dogme 95-esque realism. It includes shots of non-simulated intercourse, exulting carnality to ecstatic heights while still weaponizing the dynamic of bodies and gazes and aborted gestures to bring its political concepts to the forefront. It's also funny, if you can believe it. Not to mention that DP Ivo Lopes Araújo shoots it like a 16mm dream, beauty in defiance of convention. I Only Rest in the Storm queers up bodies, desires, cinema itself.
One should acknowledge that it's a hangout movie as much as an anticolonial epic, eager to problematize its pleasures in equal measure to its indulgences, while equally interested in drawing away from seriousness and enjoying Gui and Diara's repartee as they bet on who will shag Sérgio first. In other passages, I Only Rest in The Storm will shift ever so slightly into a noir haunted by the ghost of the last engineer to come to Guinea-Bissau at the company's request. And, of course, our Portuguese fool will fumble through that storyline like the 1940 patsies who were many a femme fatale's playthings. But be assured, Diara doesn't fit into that antagonistic mold.
Quite the contrary, she's the closest this narrative comes to a heroic presence, speaking truth to power when given the chance and inviting us to surrender to the storytelling strategies with which the film draws us into its spell. Furthermore, there's something to be said about the comfort of how one exists in front of the camera. Sérgio is always uneasy, even when he's in a position of power. Diaria, on the other hand, feels perpetually comfortable. That very comfort, the movie star ease, is her greatest act of rebellion against whatever constraints society or the medium's prevailing narratives want to impose on her. It further sets the stage for more passionate moments down the line, which strike the viewer like a sledgehammer to the face.
Reaching the end, it's quite the feat that it takes over three hours before the engineer actually talks to the communities most affected by the highway project and its promise of western-style progress. And again, it's the plurality of views that stands out. Some want the road to bring Guinea and Bissau closer together, hoping to halt the desperate migrations of men in search of work. Others fear the loss of traditions or feel content with their way of life. It's a messy situation with no correct answers, and whoever tells this story should acknowledge the complication. There's only one certainty – it shouldn't be a Portuguese engineer who knows nothing about this land to make the call.
Truth be told, this eleventh-hour lean into outright ethnographic documentary is what still gives me pause when praising I Only Rest in the Storm to the high heavens. Especially whenever we cut back to Gui and Diara or temporarily precipitate Sérgio's tale into Zama-lite delirium. In other words, the film loses its purpose when it most closely replicates how well-intentioned European cinema has traditionally viewed this particular continent and its people. It's the kind of experiment that thrives on supposed oddity, including the eyebrow-raising length and diffuse structure. Like Sérgio has to adapt to West Africa, so must the audience adapt to I Only Rest in the Storm if it hopes to get anything out of it. Decolonize your imagination, the film demands, and you should obey.
I Only Rest in the Storm is playing in the Main Slate of the 63rd New York Film Festival.