Few names in history are more synonymous with Portuguese cinema than that of Manoel de Oliveira. Perhaps we should go further still, as no cineaste in the medium's existence has followed its development for quite so long. His first project was 1931's Douro Fauna Fluvial, a non-fiction silent short whose radical form heralded the arrival of Modernism to Portuguese screens. His last major work before death was 2014's Gebo and the Shadow, a French-speaking chamber piece where theatrical tradition intersected with the digital vanguard. From pure kinetics to a studied staticity, from a cinema looking forward to one that found the future by glancing back at the past, 83 years of film. Even if he hadn't been a master of his craft, the man's sheer longevity and perseverance would have earned de Oliveira a place in the pantheon. Thankfully, historical importance is matched by the pictures' quality across the decades, metamorphoses and movie magics.
On its 50th edition, the Toronto International Film Festival honors this master of cinema's memory with a screening of his first feature, 1942's Aniki-Bóbó. The TIFF Classics selection marks the North American premiere of a new 4k restoration, bringing a film that was generally dismissed at the time of its original release to new, vibrant life. It's never looked or sounded better, a miracle on the silver screen…
Manoel de Oliveira's film career was born in the waterfront of Porto and Gaia, on both sides of the Douro river as it runs its way to the Atlantic. Naturally, when producer António Lopes Ribeiro gave him the opportunity to direct his first feature, he returned there. Moreover, those children who spent their days playing by the docks and diving from the D. Luís Bridge once again captivated young de Oliveira's camera. But of course, Aniki-Bóbó wasn't to be born out of documentary experiments. Its protagonists were dictated by Rodrigues de Freitas' Millionaire Boys, the tale which this feature debut adapted to the screen.
The story is relatively simple, following a bright-eyed youth from Porto who finds himself embroiled in a middle-school romantic triangle. He is Carlitos, and his heart skips a beat every time he sees beautiful Teresinha, often on the balcony, blessing the streets with sunny smiles. Sadly, she's more concerned with the doll that adorns the window display of a shop called Temptations. Convinced the trinket is the way to his beloved's affections, Carlitos steals it, presenting Teresinha with a token of his love. And yet, his friend, Eduardo, also shares an infatuation for the girl, complicating matters. One day, when Eduardo falls to the train tracks after a fight between former chums, the other children blame Carlitos.
At the end of the day, everything turns out all right for the little tykes, and our boyish hero even gets the girl. Holding the doll between them, the pair ascends the steep stone steps of the Undefeated City, a fade into the clouds making it look like they're rising to the heavens above. Reading this, one may suppose that Aniki-Bóbó is a childish lark for childish viewers, some sort of urban fairytale to amuse and delight its characters¡ contemporaries. The film at hand doesn't fit that description, though. More than anything, it embodies a poetic sensibility, drawing close to the melancholy of one who reflects on the innocence of the young as something they've already lived through and lost.
That said, it'd be erroneous to ascribe the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia over this tale. Even when filming a paean to his green years in 2001's Porto of My Childhood, Manoel de Oliveira was always remarkably resistant to such sentimentality. The eye that frames Carlitos and his friends is informed by a documentarian intuition. It joins a romanticism that wouldn't be out of place in Hollywood with a realism that many have credited as a precedent to what the Italians were about to unleash on the film world circa 1942. Right from the start, tensions of style and ethos define Aniki-Bóbó, opening in media res with Eduardo's perilous slip.
In this first movement, we move on the train set to the big city, following its trek in an implied welcome of the audience to a metropolitan landscape that – pardon the critical cliché – is as much a character as any of the youngsters. We see the fall and Teresita's scream, a shattering of quick shots that cut through the visual loveliness and seem to presage a tragic outcome for the story to follow. It's free-flowing, jagged, so different from what you would expect from de Oliveira if you only know his later masterpieces like the Bovarian Vale Abraão or The Strange Case of Angelica's bracing archaisms. When the main action starts proper, that impression continues.
After all, by the time his "Tetralogy of Frustrated Love" had garnered the adoration of French critics in the late 70s and early 80s, de Oliveira had moved from the streets to the studio, enclosing his creations in carefully curated tableaux where a mimetic approximation to off-screen existences wasn't just avoided but actively attacked. In those later works, human figures often appear in declamatory pose, disconnected from one another, inhabiting Brechtian devices and a mise-en-scène that privileged stillness above more commonplace cinematic dynamisms. Strange as it may sound, the director found reality through its apparent denial — a paradox that's almost entirely absent in Aniki-Bóbó, whose camera rarely rests.
Consider a schoolboy, bored out of his mind during class. Rather than observe him, de Oliveira makes the screen reflect his wandering gaze, roving through the room in search of some distraction. It dances along the cracks on the wall, eventually resting on a kitten by the windowsill, picturesque and adorable over a background of slanted rooftops and the faraway Douro. It's one of many moments where one is left to reflect how, for a director who would become one of the great lovers of the spoken word on film, so much of what works best about Aniki-Bóbo exists beyond verbiage like a silent classic that happened to be made when the talkies had become de rigueur everywhere, even in Portugal.
If de Oliveira's later style weren't so awe-inspiring in its own right, one would mourn all the possibilities we lost when the auteur decided to stray so definitely from the aesthetic principles of his first narrative feature. By the time he finally directed his second, some thirty years later, they were mostly gone. The tone is more sincere than sardonic, and the music punctuates the actor's action with a playful cheer that can just as easily pull for laughs as exult the odd melodramatic excess. And the acting, too, is a fascinating anomaly in the director's filmography, with the adults reaching for broad comedy and eleventh-hour pathos – Nascimento Fernandes, remarkable as the shopkeeper – while the child performers strike a note closer to romantic realism – Horácio Silva is a star!
Still, for all that Aniki-Bóbó entertains with its classicist pleasures and serves as an invaluable academic aid for studying de Oliveira, what remains with the audience is its vision of Porto. Shooting every exterior on location, the director and DP António Mendes orchestrate an unlikely city symphony where the geometric communion between characters and their surroundings is as crucial, if not more so, than their narrative arc. The night scenes are especially gorgeous, skirting with expressionism in passages like Carlitos' reflections on his crime. Then, the boy and his audience witness guilt manifest in the actor's own silhouette. Staggeringly simple in conception, it's an immaculate piece of filmmaking and just one of many wonders that Manoel de Oliveira brought to cinema in his many years of indefatigable creation.
Aniki-Bóbó is only one of several titles screening as part of the TIFF Classics program. Other highlights include the restored director's cut of Michael Almereyda's Nadja and one of Satyajit Ray's lesser-known masterpieces, Days and Nights in the Forest.