Playboy

my first contact with joaquim leitão's work was with his third feature film, adam and eve, in 1995. i was ten years old. it's no surprise that i was eager to see it: it was the first portuguese film co-produced by sic, which promoted it heavily, and the soundtrack was composed by pedro abrunhosa, whose album viagens (which i was given as an apology) i listened to repeatedly at the time. that, combined with the fact that the film had been mentioned at christmas dinner, meant that i wasted no time in informing my brother that i wanted to go and see it at the cinema. he was 17 — i think the film was restricted to under-12s — which meant that he could see it and, consequently, since i was accompanied by an adult, so could i. so we went to the trindade cinema. the theatre was full. the experience was so memorable that i later spent hours dubbing various scenes from the film — especially those starring ana bustorff, for whom i developed enormous admiration.

this experience opened the doors not only to portuguese cinema — i began to follow the films produced in portugal very closely — but also to other types of cinema: almodóvar's narrative mosaics and dramatic comedies, for example.

seeing adam and eve in the light of day made me admire joaquim leitão's intelligence and skill in adapting successful genres from abroad to the portuguese reality. daring to generalise: the portuguese public has (or had) a tendency to be suspicious and resistant to the idea of seeing ‘spectacular’ narratives appropriating their reality — or perhaps it is (or has been) led to do so. antónio de macedo, for example, always sought to broaden the narrative and genre possibilities in portuguese cinema, and was ostracized for it. his film seven bullets for selma, an action-packed police thriller set amid shootouts on the streets of lisbon, was harshly attacked and criticised by film buffs and critics such as joão césar monteiro, who accused him of pandering to commercial expectations and, by extension, to the dictatorial regime. but this was in 1967, 20 years before the premiere of playboy.

aware of the public's difficulty in taking portuguese films that were not comedies seriously, macedo resorted to a ‘trick’ in his first film, sunday afternoon (1965): he used voice-over at the beginning to give it a documentary tone — and therefore a more ‘serious’ one — and positively influence the audience's reception. (according to the director, the quality of the dialogue and acting in portuguese dramatic films was overly theatrical and therefore implausible, causing the audience to laugh and discredit them.) joaquim leitão did something similar in playboy, introducing another language and other nationalities right at the beginning, creating an effect of credibility for the portuguese viewer and making it more plausible that his noir thriller was set in lisbon. both knew how to set small traps to achieve suspension of disbelief.

the very use of international actors (julian maynard in playboy and karra elejalde in adam and eve) helps to invoke other imaginaries and open up possibilities for contamination with other realities.

it is a work of adaptation and education — a response to the cultural and historical conditions of the country. society in 1967 was quite different from that of 1987; there is a before and after the dictatorship, and the new cinema paved the way for other forms of filmmaking in portugal. this change is clearly felt in playboy, and also, for example, in atlântida (1985), a fantastic film by daniel del negro (director of photography for playboy), which, unfortunately, did not receive the same reception — not least because it was never commercially distributed in portugal.

with limited resources (just watch the very short credits of playboy to get an idea of the small team) and a lot of ingenuity, there have always been more or less extraordinary works made in portugal — small miracles that, regardless of their commercial success, are part of a history of cinema that i feel i must continue to honour wholeheartedly.

i can only thank adam and eve — that is, joaquim leitão and the entire technical and artistic team that made it possible — because i am fully aware of the difficulties involved in making a film (or any artistic work) in portugal.