Eloi, a paunchy middle-aged man, finds Samuel, a young sad sack, about to kill himself by plunging into the sea. Eloi takes Samuel under his wing, giving him a hot meal and bringing him to a seedy night club to introduce him to Esperança, who is said to be the most beautiful sex worker in Lisbon—and is also Eloi’s daughter.
Le dernier plongeon, 最后一跳, Ostatnie zanurzenie, Le Dernier Plongeon
Portugal
Portugal
monteiro's most undervalued film, even by his admirers, and maybe his best, a skeleton of a thing in which every passage has the intensity of verse or song. and it's heartbreaking, and angry, and hurt, if you let yourself inside it even a little. single scenes here that would make the career of a lesser filmmaker.
one of those films that one is afraid to over-recommend simply because of how small it feels and how easy it is to think of it as minor. and yet, it checks too many of my boxes for me to be able to avoid falling in love with this. set over a short duration of just two nights, it's the ultimate hangout movie in a way but between characters that are somewhat impenetrable. a series of dance scenes, each illuminating something about these characters and the changes they undergo over these two nights. impossibly moving in parts and a really gorgeous love story but also horribly dark in others. any commentary on Portuguese history and politics is mostly lost on…
The final political manifesto: fighting for being able to live life at its essence. A film so hopeful but also so angry, so tender and so bleak, a threnody that is also an ode to life, a swan song that is also a birth. A film about silence and speech, of resilience and generosity, a miracle touched by God himself. A film that gives me hope, that makes me want to eat, drink, dance, have sex. I just want to live and love.
"O destino impele-me para o desconhecido, e eu bem o mereço. A minha própria vergonha desterra-me de ti, e quem sabe por quanto tempo. Ai, prometi-te uma outra Grécia e, em vez disso, mando-te um canto fúnebre. Encontra em ti o teu próprio consolo."
HÖLDERLIN, Hyperion
This may just be the most beautiful film by João César Monteiro. As I'm writing that, his "À Flor do Mar" suddenly pops up in my mind, but I'm willing to say that "O Último Mergulho" is his most aestheticaly pleasing, just because.
I'm not really sure of what to make of the film. I'm not even sure who the protagonist is. Is there even a narrative? Or are the characters simply players in a bigger artistic scheme (since there is a long dance sequence that interconnects two parts that don't need connection). It starts off in a very natural way, but things quickly become very subjective and unexpected. Dinis Gomes was probably chosen because his physical appearence resembles that…
Maybe my favorite Monteiro? (He didn't act in this one, which for me is rather a big plus.) I understood it as It's A Wonderful Life, with the role of Clarence The Cross-Eyed Angel swapped out for a typically-Monteiro PervyOldDude. Then there's a long long digression showing the legend of Salome's dance as a nightclub strip routine... because Monteiro... and an extreme tonal shift after the James Stewart guy 'chooses life' that I couldn't make any organic sense out of at all. It ends with someone in voice-over reading some medieval text over a black screen; the last twenty minutes/so still have me scratching my head.
Definitely a film that’s hard to recommend due to its off base structure and definitely something that’s hard for myself to completely comprehend due to its allegories related to the Portuguese politics at the time, but in the end it’s this is a very gorgeous film. It’s pretty much a big mood piece (or you could call it a hangout film) centering a depressed young man who meets a perverted old man and they spend a few nights on the town together, before the story delves off into something more poetic than that. It’s definitely got some pacing issues (a verrrry long dance scene in the middle) but it’s just so gorgeous and immersive that I couldn’t help but enjoy…
O ÚLTIMO MERGULHO, João César Monteiro, 1992, por João Bénard da Costa.
A Muda
“Montrer mouille.”
SERGE DANEY
“O destino impele-me para o desconhecido e eu bem o mereço.”
HÖLDERLIN
(fala de Hyperion a Diotima em Hyperion, citada no final do filme, voz de Luís Miguel Cintra sob [ou sobre] o écran negro)
1 - Por acaso, escrevo sobre O Último Mergulho no dia em que a imprensa portuguesa publicou as primeiras críticas aos dois primeiros filmes (“O Ar” e “O Fogo”) da série “Os Quatro Elementos” em que João César Monteiro se atirou à Água. Foi uma encomenda da Televisão Portuguesa, depois de uma proposta de Paulo Branco. Os críticos que hoje leio espantam-se (alguns, virtuosamente, indignam-se) que os…
The theme of impending death creating an impetus to truly live always seems a little easy to me. It's not cheap, exactly, nor lazy, necessarily, but it's a commonly used trope that has to be done very well to really count. Ikiru and The Simpsons did it better than anyone else ever could, so it's a difficult narrative to land. I need more than simply watching someone validate their existences, even if that storyline is often emotionally satisfying even in the cheapest of depictions. Done badly, it becomes an abominably sappy, obvious, and boring mess like Life As a House.
The Last Dive's foray into all of this comes off somewhere closer to Ikiru than Hayden Christensen, thank pog, by…
Coil
It is a trick of the limit a day presses,
as lined with notice it scrapes by;
the next step still not ready, put back
any you don't use. Yes, alright
but the small one isn’t right yet
and the night won't rest, too many hours
in shadow of thin vapour. Now
the carpet is not touched and across it
light settles like a bent spring, no
delay at all. Everything is here and is
being burned slowly and is enough.
– J. H. Prynne, from Vernal Aspects (1977)
Esboço de crítica
O plano-detalhe do olho azul-céu de João César Monteiro foi o verdadeiro "último mergulho" do diretor, uma imagem extremamente passional e provocativa (e não poderia ser de outro jeito). Monteiro deixou conosco não apenas o que viu, mas também aquilo com o que viu: o globo ocular reflete a imagem da praça a que João Vuvu, seu personagem em Vai e Vem, retorna em vários trechos do filme. Aquela imagem congelada do olho foi sua transfixação do mundo, e é curioso como ela nos devolve à sua obra como um todo, nos faz recapitular rapidamente toda a singularidade do universo por ele trazido ao cinema. O contra-campo dessa imagem (em si mesma, absurdamente concreta) é uma tela…
