Morrer como um homem

To die like a man. It's the title of João Pedro Rodrigues' new film. I saw it last Sunday at the Nova cinema in Brussels during this year's edition of Pinkscreens. It is a very beautiful film. It's not just the fact that I know so many of the people and the characters in it - the film is a slice of Lisbon at night as I knew it in the late 1980's and throughout the 1990's. As I told the director during the Q&A session that followed the screening, his film has lucidité sentimentale. People tend to think that those at the margins, like transvestites, live lives detached from reality, but I actually think that they live lives that are intensely real and that is why they dream so much, and hurt so much in the process.

There was someone behind me who said to someone beside him that all Portuguese are crazy, that we are cut off from the rest of Europe, that we have nothing in common. But the themes explored in this film, apart from being universal, are very European. It deals with the quest for identity in general and gender identity in particular, with tragic love in the best classical Greek tradition, with the role of women as the initiators of mankind into the world of dreams and mysteries. Le féminin sacré; sacré féminin!

I loved seeing Maria Bakker (alwyas double K!) in the film. MB became a character à part entière, bravo! I wonder where the German quotations came from. Was it Schiele? Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida, the actor playing MB, was for many years the flatmate of my former lover, Zé Manuel. I met him many times in their flat surrounded by a haze of creative cannabis. MB is his creation and a powerful one. In the film, it made an interesting contrast to the character of Tonia, who, although apparently free to be what she wants to be, is in reality constrained by many mental strings. MB is free in her essence, not bothering to question herself about whether she is a real woman. No one is a real woman, not even biological women, in the sense that femininity is construed, invented, and is as much the product of its creator as it is in the eye of the beholder. MB does not need a sex-change, because she incarnates her imagined woman.

There are many poetic moments in the film, but there were two high such moments for me. The gambuzinos' hunt in the forest and the tableau vivant of Tonia, her boyfriend, MB, Paulinha and the doctor, resting on a tree trunk surrounded by the red of the night and listening to that song that came from everywhere and nowhere. Was it Antony, from Antony and the Johnsons? Maybe not, but it was close. I think there should be a film about MB, she is ripe for it. I hope she'll invite me to come and sing a song. Ah, me and MB, it would be a riot!

Then there is the last scene, with Tonia singing at her funeral, with Lisbon in the back, the buildings, the cars, and the red-dusk bridge over the river Tejo, with its two arches like the breasts Tonia had to give away.

The film was so sad it felt like singing all the time. And indeed it reads also as a musical, with the songs of António Variações and Marco Paulo providing most of the soundtrack; songs that the characters sing themselves on the road to their destiny. I also go through life singing. There is nothing more natural than that.

MB's relation with Paulinha, her maid, her assistant, her pianist, her lover?, made me think of Fassbinder's Petra Von Kant. It had the same qualities of dominance and submission, dependence and betrayal. After all, where would MB be without Paulinha? And what would Paulinha do if MB started to treat her right? The director said he studied Fassbinder and that there where elements of the German director's cinematography in his own films, but the Petra Von Kant thing had not been intentional, it was just me adding another layer of interpretation to the film. Yep, that's what viewers do too!

sometimes it snows in April

Today was just that kind of day. I hope you know the song. It's by Prince. If not, listen to it. It's beautiful and kind of sad. Why today? It has to do with the Treaty of Lisbon. Oh, my, now this is becoming a bit of a joke.

But seriously, there will be changes next year that will affect my work, and although I don't risk loosing my job it's hard to tell what I will be doing in say, 6 months time. Since I just started this new job in April this year, and am enjoying it!, I feel a bit cheated by the whole thing, although it was more or less to be expected. But I think the Lisbon Treaty is a good thing for Europe.

Anyway, who said feelings were neat and rational? Nobody. In fact, a bit of snow right now would cheer me up.

I miss the summer

I was standing by the kitchen window and sighed. Georgina asked, Papalu, why did you sigh? and I replied that I was feeling melancholic. What's melancholic? It's a happy kind of saudade. When you miss something with the taste of honey in your mouth. And what do you miss? I miss the summer. You miss the summer, Papalu.

And then I watched the neighbour in the garden across take a yellow bucket with water to rain on her plants. She was wearing a grey dress the colour of her hair. I saw the orange surf board against the garden window of another neighbour in the distance. Our car was still outside the garage in the patio. Black like the cat who comes to stretch on the roof of the garages.

Today he came to get a bit of sunshine on his shimmering coat. We call to him many times and he looks at us with those eyes-of-seeing-through. The leaves are barely autumnal and there's still a slight swing of warmth from the sun in their fading green. Then the cat was gone. Miao.

Ourania

Ouranos is "le ciel étoilé". Le Clézio's book, which I'm currently reading, is wet like a river. The sentences are like water and they leave you wet. They taste of water. They are so fresh you feel taken by the current of the river.

There is actually a funny story behind this book. I got it for my birthday in 2008 and forgot about it. It was the time Le Clézio had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then I took it with me this summer on the plane on my way to Moroni, Comoros. I was going there on a mission to check the political situation. But the book is what matters. I lost it on the plane. I noticed it coming out of the plane in Nairobi. I was enjoying it so much I decided to stay in line for I don't know how long just to make sure that they would find it. They had found no book in French inside my plane. Maybe on the way back from Moroni? The cleaning staff would make sure to keep it safe.

On my way back I again waited for an even longer time to see if the book had been found. No, not really. They had found a Bible, a book in English about fishing, but no book in French, I'm afraid. I guess I felt the way smokers must feel inside a non-smoking flight, anguished, sad. How will I survive all the way from Nairobi to London and then Brussels without my sky with stars, without my river? I survived, but how I missed Ourania on that flight.

And here I am now, savouring again its pages, the language so crystal clear it really feels like water. A cascade of water pouring down inside my head. Ah, it feels good when a book rains all over you!