The bath, understood within a Jewish-Christian framework as a moment of purification and sacrament, is the central narrative element of this feature by Portuguese director David Bonneville. Yet, given the inevitable profanity of a body — even, in this case, the smooth, almost immaculate body of young Alexandre (Martim Canavarro) — the bath is also a moment in which impulses and desires come to the surface. In the wake of his grandfather’s death, Alexandre is left in the care of his aunt, Josefina (Anabela Moreira), who returns to the village to attend the funeral. A novice nun about to take her vows, she moulds herself according to religious habits and, above all, an obscurantist morality guided by the practice of penance, later revealed in the wounds caused by the cilice — an instrument for mortification of the flesh — that she wears around her thigh.

The Douro landscape, and the figure of Anabela Moreira in a straw hat wandering through the trees, prompt inescapable comparisons between the director and Manoel de Oliveira, namely Leonor Silveira in Vale Abraão (1993). Yet the presence of the Moreira sisters and a tendency towards a certain dramaturgy of violence — to use Daniel Ribas’s expression (2019) — prompt particular associations with the realism of João Canijo. By constructing parallel reflections around national identity (besides the boy’s obsession with Cristiano Ronaldo, whose shirt he wears and who appears on a poster in his bedroom), the remnants of Salazarism and our inability, as José Gil would say, to inscribe ourselves on the world, the film follows in the footsteps of recent Portuguese film history, which takes as its main raw materials the orphan, metaphorical or real— a country without parents.

The gloomy atmosphere of this religiosity, amidst crosses, creeds and rosaries, is penetrated by a game of bodies resigned to boredom, or exhaustion, which the camera reveals with particular sensuality in zoom shots or extreme close-ups — for example, Josefina stretched out on the sofa or Alexandre lying on the bed — and in close-ups of faces. Alongside Alexandre’s coming-of-age, which we do not see much of other than glimpses of friends, first nights out, the local fair and games of football, there is Josefina’s own coming of age, as she delivers herself up — not without blemish, nor doubts or resistance — to the impulses of the flesh at the hands of an unknown man. In the moral impossibility of consummation with the body she desires, she strips herself bare in a manner that evokes a different sacrificial gesture. This is my body, take it and free me.

Indeed, one of the film’s opening scenes features Josefina graciously washing Alexandre’s wounded feet, re-enacting one of the most well-known Christian rituals. The association with Canijo is favoured over that with Oliveira mainly due to this being a film of bodies, more than a film of words. In the final encounter with her sister Ângela (Margarida Moreira), who intends to take back responsibility for her son, the principle of identicalness between the two bodies is subverted by their different modes: Ângela wears a red, low-cut dress and embraces her sister with ease; Josefina, though, wearing her usual overalls and hat, resists, as if her body is proscribed. Like Janus, the two sisters represent two sides of the same coin: the voluptuousness of the body, on one side, and the spiritual vocation, on the other.

But the voluptuousness of the body in O Último Banho is also the voluptuousness of the curved landscape of wine-growing terraces and, in that sense, the opening sequences of the film are already revealing. With heighted formal senses, Bonneville films a series of long shots of the estate in which we see the figure of Alexandre — employed as an element in match cuts — running between the vines. As we get closer, we finally see the detail of his bleeding hand, wounded after a fall down the terrace. In a few short minutes, the director shifts from the general body of the landscape to the detail of the boy’s body, in a feat of editing that introduces Alexandre’s indeterminate flight, which will be present from then on — in the end, he will flee to his mother before, later, returning. Also in flight is Josefina, who, following the casual tryst caused by her nephew’s absence, appears violated as she runs from the forest towards the estate. That is when she bumps into Alexandre, also coming back, who embraces her on the threshold of the front door, inverting the traditional figure of the Pietà: the young, immaculate body receives the sacrificed body, repaying her gestures of hospitality.