Mal
Portugal/Brazil/Ireland/Spain 1999
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Lisbon, the present. Cathy Coelho, an Irish woman living in Lisbon and happily married to a Portuguese lawyer Pedro, is mugged in the street by Daniel, a young junkie. He's caught, but she insists that he's released and gives him money. Daniel's mother, in despair over her son, joins a cult. At the railway station an elderly man distractedly searches for his young granddaughter who has run away; elsewhere the child roams the streets. Pedro, who unknown to Cathy is a compulsive womaniser, meets his ex-wife for a drink and seduces her young female friend. A former radical, he now helps rich speculators demolish slum tenements.
When Sean, a one-time Sinn Fein comrade of Cathy's, arrives, an uneasy Pedro persuades Cathy to avoid a further meeting. Cathy learns she is HIV +, infected by Pedro. Shattered, she throws him out. The lost little girl is chanced upon by an unhappily married jeweller who takes her to a hotel room. There, he kills himself but leaves the girl unharmed. Daniel, robbing a depot, is wounded by an armed guard. He shoots the guard dead and makes his way to Cathy's apartment; she takes him in, tends his wound and helps him off drugs. Once healed he leaves to go back on the streets, though she begs him to stay. Weak from her illness, Cathy drives wildly through the city, encountering people fleeing from some massive disaster.
Review
Fado - meaning, literally, fate - is the chief style of Portuguese folk-song. Its predominant mood is relentlessly pessimistic to an almost comic degree: in the typical fado everything is terrible and can only get worse. Tellingly, a fado features on the soundtrack of Mal (along with, eclectically enough, Pat Boone and John McCormack). In a moment worthy of this doleful folk music, Cathy, the ex-pat Irish woman succumbing to Aids caught from her tom-cat of a husband, comforts herself with the reflection that "There's always someone whose suffering is greater." This insight is borne out by the film as a whole, in which virtually all the characters encounter disaster or death. Even a couple glimpsed briefly in the street are locked in a savage marital squabble. Only the seemingly most vulnerable, the little runaway girl, survives everything unscathed, protected by her matter-of-fact innocence.
With its multiple urban stories criss-crossing and sometimes intersecting, Mal comes across as a scaled-down version of Robert Altman's Short Cuts or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. But while Mal bears certain structural similarities to these, it lacks Altman's intricately entwined ironies no less than Anderson's flamboyant sense of fantasy; the stories Portuguese director Alberto Seixas Santos tells are banal and do little to illuminate each other. In a film whose "main theme is evil and its power of contamination," the vital links are missing: there's no connection between, say, Pedro's loveless philandering and the suicide of the jeweller trapped in an acrimonious marriage. The impression you get is of a batch of random newspaper reports slung together in search of a thesis.
Along the way, Seixas Santos, whose 1973 film Brandos costumes was banned in Portugal for its radical content, gropes towards a wider political context: the plight of African immigrants in Europe (Cathy works for a refugee agency), the dispossession of the urban poor, the souring of youthful radical ideals. ("Dreams have a sell-by date. I've learned that. You haven't," Pedro patronisingly remarks.) But none of these themes is developed, and the most effective moments are smaller and more personal incidents, unburdened by weighty intimations: the little girl, casually begging on behalf of a blind street musician and pragmatically taking one coin for him, one for herself; Cathy, weeping in her car, reverting to childhood mantras and gulping the phrases of a Hail Mary; or the two cheeky-faced street urchins who with casual cruelty burn an old man's treasured photo of his granddaughter. Unforced moments such as these carry far more power than the film's metaphysical gestures or its arbitrary cataclysmic finale.
Credits
- Director
- Alberto Seixas Santos
- Producer
- Amãndio Coroado
- Story/Screenplay
- Alberto Seixas Santos
- Director of Photography
- Acácio de Almeida
- Editor
- Catarina Ruivo
- Production Designer
- Maria José Branco
- ©Rosa Filmes/Quimera Filmes/Metropolitan Films/Camelot Pélis
- Production Companies
- Rosa Filmes presents in co-production with
- Metropolitan Films (Ireland), Camelot Pélis (Spain), Quimera Filmes (Brazil),
- Radiotelevisião Portuguesa (Portugal)
- Supported by Eurimages
- Financially assisted by IPACA Instituto Portugués da Arte Cinematográfica e
- Audiovisual and Secretaria para o Desenvolvimento do Audiovisual do Ministério
- da Cultura do Brasil
- Associate Producers
- Luis Collar
- James Flynn
- Simone Magalhães
- Production Manager
- António Gonçalo
- Unit Production Manager
- Luis Silva
- Assistant Directors
- Maria Paola Porru
- Paulo Guilherme Santos
- Miguel Sargento
- João Pedro Rodrigues
- Script Supervisor
- Patricia Saramago
- Casting
- Antro
- Hubbard Casting
- Story Collaborators
- António Cabrita
- Maria Velho Da Costa
- Luís Salgado Matos
- José Dias de Souza
- Special Effects
- Fernando Monteiro
- Set Decorator
- Carlos Subtil
- Wardrobe
- Silvia Grabowski
- Make-up/Hairstylist
- Ana Lorena
- Titles
- João Botelho
- Title Opticals
- Jerónimo Silva
- Soundtrack
- "Love Letters in the Sand" - Pat Boone; "The Green Isle of Erin" - John McCormack; "Fado Rita" - Maria Teresa Noronha; "Jordanna" - Don Baker; "Das Buch mit sieben Sigeln" - Franz Schmidt
- Sound
- Victor Puertas
- Vasco Pimentel
- Nuno Carvalho
- Dubbing
- Vasco Pimentel
- Sound Editors
- Vasco Pimentel
- Nuno Carvalho
- Cast
- Pauline Cadell
- Cathy Coelho
- Rui Morrisson
- Pedro Coelho
- Alexandre Pinto
- Daniel
- Alicia Gomes Da Costa
- little girl
- Fábio Emanuel Silva
- Daniel's friend
- José Pinto
- little girl's grandfather
- Luis Lima Barreto
- Senhor Cruz
- Manuela Carona
- Cathy's friend
- Maria Santos
- Marta
- Lia Gama
- Emilia, Daniel's mother
- Zita Duarte
- Assunção
- Don Baker
- Sean
- Sofia Aparicio
- TV star
- Luis Esparteiro
- Luis Vicente
- Carlos César
- Costa
- Madalena Leal
- Maria da Luz, Pedro's sister
- Sofia Leite
- Marianada Luz, Pedro's sister
- Helena Flór
- Clara
- Paula Só
- believer
- Rui Luís
- lorry driver
- Baltazar Terlica
- bus driver
- Orlando Filipe
- cameraman
- Raquel Maria
- Paula Sá Nogueira
- Águeda Sena
- women residents
- Bia Gomes
- Senhora Mutembe
- Carla Chambel
- jeweller's girl
- Miguel Figueiredo
- António Evora
- men residents
- Augusto Portela
- policeman
- Hugo Sequeira
- young boy
- Vanessa Agapito
- journalist
- Luís Branquinho
- Luís Filipe
- little boys
- Adelino Tavares
- attacker
- Pedro Efe
- guard
- Maria Henriqueta
- guard's wife
- João Viegas
- blind man
- José Dias De Souza
- down and out
- Zita Ferreira
- Francisca
- Nuno Vieira De Almeida
- church organist
- Miguel Mendes
- priest
- dubbed voices
- Maria João Luís
- Pauline Cadell
- Sylvie Rocha
- Maria Santos
- Sérgio Freire Delgado
- Fábio Emanuel Silva
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Artificial Eye Film Company
- 7,689 feet
- 85 minutes 26 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Subtitles
- [1.66:1]