IDENTITIES ADRIFT – LUSOPHONE ENCOUNTERS IN PORTUGUESE CINEMA Carolin Overhoff Ferreira INTRODUCTION Portugal’s colonial and postcolonial history is a European exception. It was one of the first European colonial powers and one of the last to let go of its African colonies after its peaceful revolution in 1974, which ended five decades of dictatorship and five centuries of empire. Due to its journeys of discoveries and its many colonies spanning Brazil to Macau, but even more because of its weak socio-political and economic situation from the eighteenth century onwards, Portugal has always been a country of massive emigration. Accordingly, its cinema has been more interested in this subject than in portraying the relatively recent impact of migration into the country. While the decolonisation process after 1974 was an important factor for movements to Portugal, it was only when the country joined the European Community in 1986 that it become more attractive for immigrants. Since the country remained distant from the social and economic standards of first world nations, Portuguese emigration to Brazil, richer European countries or the United States of America did not cease.1 The first migrants to Portugal came mainly from the Cape Verde islands in the 1960s when they were still considered Portuguese ultramarine territories. Its inhabitants were thought of as assimilated Africans and allowed to work in the mainland’s construction and manufacturing industries. As a result of its colonial history, the influx of migrants since the mid 1980s until today originates largely from the PALOP (Países de Língua Oficial Portuguesa)2 that became independent in 1975 and suffered the consequences of brutal civil wars for a long period.3 The second largest group of migrants now derives from Brazil with which Portugal retained strong emigrational ties after independence in 1822, while the third place in the immigration rankings is occupied by Ukrainians due to migration after the end of the Soviet Union (Malheiros 2002). In contrast to many other European countries, except France and Great Britain, contact between migrants and the Portuguese population results primarily from historical, cultural and linguistic ties. Moreover, Portugal has sustained a post-colonial discourse in which language plays a significant if not fundamental role: the concept of Lusofonia (Lusophony) suggests cultural homogeneity and harmony among the Portuguese speaking world and is based, unlike the paternalistic Francophone or the arrogant Anglophone discourses, on an imaginary brotherhood. By constantly invoking a common language and memory it thus turns a blind eye to colonial and post-colonial conflicts. 1 Decolonisation led, in fact, to an inverted migration process since Portuguese citizens who had migrated to the African colonies now returned in large numbers. In terms of non-Portuguese citizens, immigrant numbers remained rather small, so that, in 1981, only 54,414 foreigners, of which thirty per cent came from Europe, were registered with the Service of Foreigners and Frontiers. This number had more than quadrupled by 2003 when immigrants with resident permits represented 2.3 per cent of the population to which should be added the temporary permanence permit holders who accounted for a further 1.7 per cent of Portugal’s inhabitants (Malheiros 2002). 2 Countries with Portuguese as their official language. 3 According to Malheiros (2002) Angola represents 9.9 per cent, Cape Verde 22.3 per cent and Guinea-Bissau 7.6 per cent of legal immigrants. 1 The Portuguese literary critic Eduardo Lourenço (1999) was one of the first to challenge and demystify this symbolic power of the Portuguese language and its theorisation through the concept of ‘Lusofonia’. Although the concept is used as reference for a common history, culture and language, this authoritative voice on Portuguese culture questions the idea of a unified idiom, stressing the misuse of Fernando Pessoa’s famous phrase ‘my country is the Portuguese language’ and arguing in favour of recognising the diversity of Portuguese languages – and therefore cultures – that resulted from linguistic transformations in Africa and Brazil. The author suggests that Pessoa’s writing was a linguistic adventure that consisted primarily in pointing out that language had no subject and that the Portuguese language belonged rather to everybody and nobody. According to Lourenço it is absurd to use Pessoa in a neo-colonialist and nationalistic manner, since his expression was personal and unpatriotic: Isto não abre para nacionalismos tribais, para patriotismos de exclusão da universalidade alheia. A nossa relação com a lingua é de outra natureza e é outra a patria que nela temos ou donde somos. Por isso a tão famosa frase quer dizer apenas: a lingua portuguesa, esta lingua que me fala antes que a saiba falar, mas, acima de tudo, esta lingua que através de mim se torna uma realidade não só viva mas única, a lingua através 4 da qual me invento Fernando Pessoa, é ela a minha patria. (Lourenço 1999: 126) In Lourenço’s understanding language played an extraordinary role in Portugal’s cultural formation and has always been a source of feverish exaltation and secret suffering. While imperial in vocation, Portuguese has in fact been provincial and has never achieved the influence of other languages such as English and French (Lourenço 1999: 131-3). Today, after decolonisation, Lourenço insists in the necessity of rephrasing Pessoa: one should not speak of one Portuguese language but of a plurality of countries, peoples and languages. The author believes that the unconscious neo-colonial attitude that suggests that sharing a language implies sharing a culture can only be avoided by this awareness. Since language is a privileged place for the formation of identity, Portuguese has to be seen as a pluralised language: it is not the language that the Portuguese people speak but the voice that ‘speaks’ the Portuguese and other peoples who share the same linguistic roots: ‘A lingua portuguesa é menos a lingua que os Portugueses falam do que a voz que fala os Portuguêses.’ (Lourenço 1991: 121) Consequently, any analysis of Portuguese films under the perspective of plurilingualism has to part from an open concept that not only considers the languages spoken in the former colonies – like the different Creoles – but also the diverse Portuguese accents and grammars. Indeed, the few Portuguese films that do deal with immigrants structure their narratives around cultural encounters between characters with various Lusophone backgrounds. So far only three Portuguese filmmakers have dedicated feature films to the subject: Pedro Costa, author as much of Casa de Lava 5, 1994, set mostly on the Cape Verdean Ilha de Fogo, as of the ‘Fontainha trilogy’ (Ossos6, 1997, No Quarto da Vanda 7, 2000, Juventude em Marcha 8, 2006) about the lives of Cape Verdean immigrants and their descendants in the Lisbon slum Estrela d’África; Teresa Villaverde, whose interest in the future of adolescents made her choose ‘This does not offer a basis for tribal nationalisms or exclusive patriotisms of a strange universalism. Our relation with language is of a different kind, as is the country that it offers us to inhabit. The famous phrase only wants to say that the Portuguese language, the language that speaks me before I learn to speak, and, even more importantly, that I turn not only into a living reality but also into the only reality – in other words: the language that I use to invent myself, Fernando Pessoa, this language is my country.’ (Translation by the author). 5 Down to Earth. 6 Bones. 7 In Vanda’s Room. 8 Colossal Youth. 4 2 an African descendant as one of three main characters in Os Mutantes9, 1998 (and, exceptionally, a young Russian woman in Transe, 2006); and Leonel Vieira who offers a mainstream portrait of the second generation of Angolan immigrants in Zona J 10 (1998). Additionally, there are some co-productions between Portugal, the PALOP and Brazil that tackle the subject of migration. They were directed by filmmakers of diverse Lusophone backgrounds and tell stories about Brazilian and African migrants in Europe: Terra Estrangeira 11 (Walter Salles, 1995), Fintar o Destino12 (Fernando Vendrell, 1998), Nha Fala 13 (Flora Gomes, 2002), Tudo isto é Fado14 (Luís Galvão Teles, 2003) and Um Tiro no Escuro15 (Leonel Vieira, 2005). This article aims to give an overview of these films and to show how they deal with the question of Lusofonia by analysing the filmmaker’s portrayal of the encounters between representatives of the different languages and accents that depart from mainland Portuguese. Its main objective is to understand what perspectives they develop on post-colonial Lusophone identities, that is, if they replicate the neo-colonial discourse on cultural and linguistic homogeneity and harmony or engage with the potential conflicts of a plurality of languages and countries. PORTUGUESE CINEMA Pedro Costa is one of the most internationally recognised Portuguese filmmakers of his generation, and his discourse on Lusophony is varied, paradoxical and intriguing. The first film on the subject, Casa de Lava, engages with Leon, a Cape Verdean construction worker, who is accompanied by a Portuguese nurse, Mariana, back to his island after he falls into a coma due to a failed suicide attempt. Although money was sent to pay for his return, nobody takes an interest in him when he arrives and it takes Mariana some time to discover his relatives and his relationship with a Portuguese woman, Edith. This other Portuguese woman’s story indicates a bigger picture of trans-cultural relationships since she also came to the island to accompany someone: a prisoner who was sent during the dictatorship to the legendary concentration camp Tarrafal. The Capeverdeaan Creole languages an important instrument to discuss the cultural encounters in this highly visual and elliptic narrative. Like other Creole languages, Creole with Portuguese as its base is a result of the linguistic encounter during colonisation. From a grammatical point of view it is a differentiated and autonomous language, which, once it was formed, became the symbol of a proper identity in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. After the separation of the two countries in 1980, it was recognized as a written language in Cape Verde in 1998. Given that it is actually more common than Portuguese, there are initiatives to turn it into the only official language.16 In Casa de Lava Creole the relationship between culture and language is a means to manifest Mariana’s struggle in dealing with what is seen as a different, even strange, culture and her changing relationship with it. Accordingly, she seems to understand everything said in Creole 9 The Mutants. J Zone. 11 Foreign Land. 12 Dribbling Fate. 13 My Voice. 14 Fado Blues. 15 A Shot in the Dark. 16 See for further informations on the formation of Creole with Portuguese as its base: http://cvc.institutocamoes.pt/hlp/geografia/crioulosdebaseport.html (30 April 2010). 10 3 when she arrives, but her difficulties in getting a deeper understanding of Cape Verdean culture is then reflected in her oscillating relationship with the country’s language. The film makes it clear that Cape Verdean culture and language remember only on the surface its Portuguese roots and lexica. Notwithstanding her initial comprehension, when circumstances become more complex, especially Leon’s relationship with other characters, Mariana suddenly needs an interpreter. Interpretation is easily provided since everybody is bilingual and thus, linguistically a step ahead of Mariana. She also demands that the Portuguese characters speak to her in her native language, especially Edith, whose adaptation to Creole culture and language and her role as Leon’s former lover Mariana does not understand in the beginning. Yet when she has a passionate encounter with Edith’s nameless son who was born on the island and speaks only Creole, Mariana asks him to speak to her in the native tongue, thus attributing to it and enjoying an erotic connotation of its strangeness. Most of the time, Mariana takes up a rather aggressive stance towards Cape Verdean culture and expresses her resentment also by attacking its language: during a fight with Leon she denigrates him through his language by saying that she understands his cowardly language.. Thus, the film depicts cultural conflicts between Mariana and the Cape Verdeans or the Portuguese characters that live on the island as conflicts of language. It demonstrates the main character’s unwillingness to integrate, as well as it suggests that she becomes more and more enchanted with the people´s crude emotions which are, in fact, not unlike her own. The open ending hints at the possibility that she will remain on the island and become a part of its culture, like Edith and her nameless son who, by only speaking Creole, ignore (or have at least forgotten) their Portuguese origin. Both Portuguese and Creole cultures are represented with a consciousness of their ambivalences. Mariana is overconfident (especially in her profession as a nurse), ‘paternalistic’ and intrusive, but also engaging and caring. Additionally, there are more stereotypical features related to the African culture which indicate a clear gender divide – on the one hand complicity among the hard working women and on the other the lack of responsibility by the men who are absent, seductive and violent. But the Ilha de Fogo and its extreme and arid nature is also a metaphor for a more complex, but mysterious and – especially from Mariana’s European perspective – incomprehensive culture, whose most striking characteristics are paradoxical: a close relationship between death and desire, but also a passive, gloomy, yet relaxed and festive attitude towards life. Although conscientious of the cultural differences that question the Lusophone imaginary of a unified culture and language, Casa de Lava repeats, at the same time, the myth of the aptitude of the Portuguese to submerge in another ‘strange’ and initially hostile culture. The famous cafrealização – an expression for the adaptation of the Portuguese to African values, institutions and means of production – has been used to stigmatise this involvement, but has equally been considered a Portuguese capacity to adapt to tropical cultures (Santos 2001: 54). Mariana, and before her Edith, are aware that they are getting lost in the new surrounding and, in particular Edith, in its language; yet start enjoying a life away from European conventions and ideas after some resistance. One of the last shots shows Leon and Edith together in the house of lava (of the original title in Portuguese), suggesting that there is a shared place by Creole and Portuguese culture based on reciprocal passion – a possibility for a Lusophone communion in the daunting African environment. One of its main expressions can be found in its language that although based on Portuguese has taken on a proper yet, and this is Costa’s point, mixed identity. Ossos17 follows up on Casa de Lava’s gender divide within African culture but offers an almost opposite perspective on intercultural communication due to the change of location: Pedro Costa now looks at the second generation of Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon who live in the 17 See for a more complex discussion of the film Ferreira 2005 and 2007. 4 shanty town Estrela d’África, which was constructed in the 1970s by the first migrants. Even though all the characters now speak Portuguese, the cultural and, especially, economic barriers between the former coloniser and the descendants of the colonized are here impossible to be overcome. This is told through the story of Tina, a young mother who has no support from her boyfriend (simply called the ‘father’). Her friends, particularly Clotilde, try to help her through her depression that makes her try to kill herself twice: firstly after giving birth and again when the father takes the child away in order to make money (by begging on the streets and later by trying to sell it). The baby becomes the link between the universe of a middle class nurse and the marginal life of the poor Cape Verdean descendants. This nurse assists the father on the street with food and then at the hospital after he almost killed the child by feeding it with bread and alcohol. She gets interested in keeping the baby but is repelled by the idea of paying for it. At the same time, Clotilde tries to recover Tina’s child, finds out the whereabouts of the father and gets Tina a cleaning job at the nurse’s home. But the child is no longer with the nurse since the father gave it to a prostitute he is friendly with. Even though the nurse’s apartment becomes the stage for Lusophone (dis)encounters, there is no such thing as the house of lava, that is, a metaphoric but also linguistic space in which the two cultures meet and unite in harmony. In fact, only the nurse is capable of moving freely between the two separate worlds. While she seems to engage with the immigrant’s – she gives the father shelter, would take care of the baby, and tries to be friends with Tina –, she is also treacherous due to her loneliness and trespasses moral limits by sleeping with Clotlide’s husband (who is only interested in sex) on her first visit to the community. Tina, Clotilde and the ‘father’, on the other hand, can only pass the invisible borderline when they have something to offer: their low-paid labour or the baby. Aesthetically the film shows that the characters are incapable of getting in touch with the outer world in order to position themselves within a visual field that might serve to constitute their subjectivity. The cinematographic strategies concentrate on isolation and suffering and end up turning the characters into victims. Since their circumstances are not really explored, they often seem caught within the frame and not within their condition. Language plays again an important role. There is a generalised difficulty in communicating, which is apparent through the very little dialogue. Whereas the Creole community is again bilingual, Tina, Clotilde and the father speak exclusively Portuguese – also among each others. There are actually only two characters who speak almost exclusively Creole, although they are bilingual: Clotilde’s husband who is portrayed as a stereotypical macho, and her son who enters in his father’s footsteps when he prohibits his mother to enter their home while the father is sleeping with the nurse. Thus, Creole does not draw a line between Portuguese and Cape Verdeans as it does in Casa de Lava, but between the men and women of the migrant community. Whilst Portuguese is the main means of communication, dominated by everyone even if scarcely used, Creole is used to express an African chauvinist attitude. The closure of the film underlines this shift from a discussion of the social relationship between former colonisers and colonised to that of the gendered relationship within the community: the last sequence shows Clotilde trying first to kill the father by opening the kitchen gas (in the same way that Tina tried to kill herself) and then moving in with Tina. Instead of a Lusophone brotherhood and adaptation to a language that draws equally on African and Portuguese culture, or a passionate intercultural liaison, Ossos presents an inter-communal sisterhood that shuts doors and windows to both Cape Verdean men and Portuguese society, notwithstanding the fact that they speak the same languages. The documentary No Quarto da Vanda, the second part of the Fontainha’s Trilogy, enters radically into Vanda Duarte’s (the actress of Clotilde) life in order to show a less melancholic yet cruder picture of the second generation’s life depicted in Ossos. The film accompanies not only 5 Vanda’s drug habit, her job (selling groceries from door to door), her conversations with friends, but also other drug users and the destruction of their neighbourhood, which is being demolished to give space to social housing apartment blocks. Language features only in the background, yet when it comes to the fore at one point it puts forward a powerful argument on the reasons for the second generation’s marginal lives. The movie was filmed with a digital camera in long static and extremely beautiful and dense shots that are reminiscent of paintings and allow the spectator a long reflection on the marginal world of Estrela d’África. Inscribed in the romantic tradition, the documentary gives voice to the underdogs of Portuguese society whose unhappy lives are given 170 minutes of time and space thus bestowing an importance to their troubles, drug addiction and social exclusion that they are usually denied. In contrast to both Casa de Lava and Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda has no gendered discourse. Both men and women suffer from marginalisation, use or sell drugs, look for places to stay or tell their sad stories. The fact that Vanda is the daughter of immigrants is not even directly acknowledged; on the contrary, she identifies with language and culture and questions certain features of the Portuguese society as being typical for her country. Even though the characters assume Portuguese identity, communicate exclusively in Portuguese and are not explicitly characterised as having Cape Verdean roots, there is one scene in which their heritage is strongly remembered. While Vanda’s mother and sister are skinning a rabbit in the yard, we hear a man’s voice in off lecturing Vanda in Creole. He questions her lack of respect and tells her that she would have received a lesson in Cape Verde for her behaviour, because only in Portugal there was no justice and everyone did as he liked. There is a cut to Vanda’s room where she is sitting on her bed and starts smoking crack. The voice goes on questioning her lifestyle – the fact that she spends all day in bed and does not work. Another cut shows in a medium close up part of the man’s body – an arm, his violin and part of his dress – and, without revealing his face, his voice tells Vanda about the hardships on his island in Cape Verde where men and women get up at three o’clock in the morning and work all day. The man leaves by saying that it was useless to talk to her and the film cuts back to Vanda who goes on smoking and mumbles that he must have been mistaken in the door. It is not clear if the man is her father or a father figure, but he introduces a moral judgment that is absent in the rest of the film where the drug habit is a natural gesture – like eating, drinking, working and talking – and its users complex, ill and unhappy creatures. Dissimilar to the usage of Creole in Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda suggests, not unlike Casa de Lava, that Creole culture is, literally, more down to earth and wiser than Portuguese culture. In the earlier film the lesson is learned by the Portuguese character Mariana that becomes permeable to this wisdom, while in the non-fiction film the second-generation character Vanda seems to ignore it. The argument here seems to be that the adaptation process to European culture and language impoverishes and marginalises the African descendants, while Creole culture is, albeit its mysterious surface, not only more open but also more enriching. The fact that the second generation does understand but not speak Creole is a means of expressing their alienation. Juventude em Marcha follows up on this idea through its main character, a first generation immigrant. The Creole language features strongly in the film and develops the perspective that Cape Verdean language and culture are a reservoir of traditional values and virtues. It extends on the thought already present in Ossos and No Quarto da Vanda that the values represented by this anonymous man are endangered due to the destruction of the neighbourhood. Neither a documentary like No Quarto da Vanda, nor a fiction like Ossos or Casa de Lava, the film’s hybrid structure reconstructs without temporal or spacial linearity the past and present life of Ventura, an immigrant from the times of the first influx in the 1960s. Ventura was a construction worker and helped to build one of the most important cultural institutions in Portugal, the 6 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which hosts a museum, a library and a centre for the arts, as well as other institutions related to the country’s scientific and artistic development. He is mainly characterised by his relationships to young characters who he considers his children. It is not evident if these young people – including Vanda – who he visits or talks to are in fact his biological offspring or if he is a father figure to them, but they construct Ventura as a patriarchal reference that represents the now anachronistic Cape Verdean value system of hard work, solidarity and dignity. The film has no story but aims to paint a dignifying portrait of this immigrant who dedicated his life indirectly to the development of Portugal. Instead of presenting a plot on Ventura’s social contacts, past experiences and misfortunes, Juventude em Marcha is a massive visual experience that turns the Creole worker into a living monument. Notwithstanding the fact that the title refers to a slogan of the Cape Verdean liberation movement against colonialism, and the use of a political song in Creole, ‘Labanta Braço’ in one of the scenes, the film’s politics are as much linguistic as visual. Critics have celebrated the film’s aesthetic as outstanding, arguing that its choice of angles, long shots and lightning challenge conventional perception (Gardnier 2006). Indeed, Costa creates an atmosphere in which the shots of Ventura turn him and the other characters into a master piece – a monumentalisation which becomes even more obvious when he visits his former work place, the Gulbenkian Museum of Art, where the paintings in exhibition suggest a close comparison with the filmmaker’s iconography and lightning. Just like No Quarto da Vanda, a marginalised and unspectacular character is given centre stage; only this time it is not the negative result of migration – a generation without perspective lost in drug consumption – but an earlier diligent age group. Nonetheless, resembling Vanda, Ventura is shown to be caught within a process of deteriorating identity that stems from his condition as migrant. And, in contrast to the visual celebration of his personality, this occurs on the level of language. Ventura’s longing to return to Cape Verde is introduced through a letter written to a loved one on the islands – which already appeared in Casa de Lava and expresses the hope to return full of money and with gifts. It is repeated various times like a leitmotif and is the most evident sign of how language expresses that his identity is adrift. When the letter is composed for a friend while they are playing cards, it is first recited by Ventura in Creole and then repeated in Portuguese. It is then cited another five times – three of them in Portuguese –, as though the speaker would try to overcome the distance created by the new life and language through repetition, at the same time as it manifests the impossibility to do so. The choice of language indicates clearly whether the character belongs or not to Portuguese society. Vanda, who is now a mother and drug free, tells the story of the birth of her child in both Portuguese and Creole, depending on whether she addresses Ventura or is relating her dialogue with the Portuguese nurses. She is now more rooted – due to her new home, working husband and child – and therefore more capable of dealing with her double identity as both Portuguese citizen and Cape Verdean descendant. Ventura, on the other hand, speaks mainly Creole and only the longing letter reminds us of his plurilingualism. He is rather in limbo, an in-between, and his choice of Creole expresses that he does not belong to the two cultures as Vanda does. Portuguese culture is again exclusive and mainly associated to the modernisation of the neighbourhood and the construction of clean and anonymous apartment blocks that extinguish the Cape Verdean culture and community life cultivated by Ventura. The strongest metaphor for this loss is the new empty apartment in which Ventura lives without any relatives, given that his supposed children have apartments of their own, and, like Vanda, are coping much better with this change. The film’s aesthetic strategies try to counterbalance Ventura’s limbo by attributing to him and his generation the place that they deserve, that is, within the portray gallery of distinguished personalities. Because of this feature the filmmaker has been accused of elitism, given that the 7 worker is being integrated into a bourgeois aesthetic sense of high art (Krivochein 2007). While being partly true, Juventude em Marcha is also of a striking beauty that attributes to Ventura an unquestionable dignity, and at the same time, goes beyond the rather naïf believe in Lusophone harmony that we encounter at the end of Down to Earth and that (as Ossos and No Quarto da Vanda equally suggest) seems only possible on African soil. In contrast to Ossos, where the women reject as much the Portuguese as the men of their own community, the film accepts ambivalence and does not try to resolve Ventura’s paradoxical situation. Besides using intertextual references that assimilate the Cape Verdean migrant into a European iconographic system, it also points linguistically at the main character’s difficulties to integrate, as well as at the contribution of the first generation of immigrants to Portuguese society. The films by Teresa Villaverde (Os Mutantes) and Leonel Vieira (Zona J) are equally concerned with integration of African descendents who have no linguistic barriers or memories, but search less for ways of recognizing them by means of their cinematography, than to express aesthetically their rejection in Portugal’s reality.18 However, the approaches of Villaverde, a highly acclaimed auteur like Costa, and Vieira, a producer of blockbusters19, could not be more different. Os Mutantes tells the story of three adolescents, Andreia (Ana Moreira), Pedro (Alexandre Pinto), and Ricardo (Nelson Varela) who live in state run institutions. In two parallel narratives the filmmaker shows their desire to find an alternative to their obligatory homes by running away. While Andreia is pregnant and initially tries to meet the father of her child (who is part of the African diaspora), the boys are in search of adventures but are caught and taken back by the police. Then their paths separate: Pedro still has a father, whom he is allowed to visit after having been arrested; Ricardo runs away from the institution, lives on the streets and since he needs money, steals from a warehouse, where he is caught by a group of adult men who kick him violently to death. Although life is hard for all of them, the boy of African descent is the most vulnerable of the three: he was almost raped during their first escapade, in which they participate in the shooting of a German pedophilic film in order to get some money, and ends up paying with his life. The chronological stories are told through a structure that obeys a visual pattern and not a plot of cause and effect. This also results from the way Villaverde uses space. She rarely reveals where her characters are; although they move all over Lisbon, they seem imprisoned within the frame of the shots. It is more important to be close to them than to tell an easily accessible and coherent realistic narrative. Similar to Ossos, there is no affirmation what so ever of Lusophone myths of a shared place, apart from the fact that all share the same language. The film clearly indicates that within Portugal’s postcoloniality race is an issue that endangers Luso-Africans even more than the already vulnerable adolescents. Zona J offers the same discourse in terms of the impossibility of integration of a different adolescent – who not only speaks Portuguese as his mother tongue but also holds Portuguese citizenship – yet believes naively in another myth: the luso-tropicalist idea that racial mixture is a solution to racism.20 The film’s protagonist is the eighteen-year-old António, son of hard-working 18 See for a more complex discussion of the films Ferreira 2005 and 2007. Zona J, a co-production with the private television channel SIC achieved the highest box office takings in the year of its release, 1998. According to the Portuguese Film Institute ICAM (Instituto do Cinema, Audiovisual e Multimédia) (2002: 172) 246,073 spectators saw the film, placing it forth in the ranking of the ten Portuguese films with the biggest audiences. 20 The concept of luso-tropicalism can be traced back to the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freire. Margarida Calafate Ribeiro cites Caeiro da Mata who suggested that it consists in euphemisms since the concept turned five centuries of colonialism into five centuries of relationships between different cultures and people, the colonial society into a multi-racial society, the imperial nation into a multi-continental nation and Portugal’s civilizational and religious mission into Portugal’s integration into the tropics (Ribeiro 2004: 152). 19 8 immigrants from Angola who live in an apartment block at Lisbon’s outskirts, the Zona J, part of the suburb Chelas. His relationship with Portuguese society is explored through his romance with Carla, a middle-class white girl, and through his involvement with his group of friends, who live from petty theft and are planning a major crime. Even though Antonio comes from a stable home, his story ends just like Ricardo’s: with his death. Due to some rather unbelievable plot points – Carla becomes pregnant, his father loses his job and gets involved in diamond smuggling to Angola – he decides to participate in a jewellery robbery where he gets wounded. The film actually presents criminality as the only possible survival strategy for both the second and the first generation of African immigrants. Portuguese society is literally black and white; and this is presented as permanent and unchangeable. It is also suggested that António never really wants to be part of Portuguese society and culture: his room is decorated with posters of Africa. When he is wounded during the assault, it is clear to him that he does not want to remain in Portugal and he tries to travel with Carla to Angola. The box office success of Zona J is easily explained by the film’s conventionality, its ‘visually attractive’ and ‘engaging narrative’, referred to by the critic Eurico de Barros (n.d.). Indeed, the film manages to present a demanding topic in an entertaining format, so that the spectator can easily escape the challenge to engage critically with the exclusion of Luso-Africans. Albeit its denunciation of xenophobia, the closure effortlessly dismisses the second generation as a lost cause and passes on to the unborn third generation that Carla is expecting. The last sequence shows António dying in Carla’s arms while she looks symbolically to the horizon, holding her hand over the unborn in her womb. Instead of offering a solution, this rhetoric of positive racial mixture puts forward luso-tropicalist discourse in a different disguise. Language is by no means a form of unification, just a means of communication that does not imply a deeper relation to the Portuguese culture, which is hostile against its immigrants, mainly because of their colour of skin. LUSOPHONE CO-PRODUCTIONS Due to a diplomatic crisis in 1993, when Portugal signed the Schengen Treaty and started to block Brazilian and PALOP citizens at its airports, the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries, CPLP (Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa), was created in 1996. This supra-national organisation, which aims to foster cultural, political and economic relations, triggered the discussion on Lusophony referred to earlier. Since its creation it has not only revived the myth of Lusophone homogeneity and harmony but, in order to foster this idea, also revitalised existing agreements for cultural collaboration or stimulated new ones. I will now look at the resulting two Luso-African and three Luso-Brazilian co-productions that deal with contemporary migration and Lusophony and ask to what extent they remystify cultural and linguistic bonds or if they succeed, as one might hope for, to develop multilateral perspectives.21 Walter Salles’ and Daniela Thomas’ Terra Estrangeira was the first co-production in this context and reacted directly to the economic crises that resulted from president Fernando Collor de Mello’s economic plan in 1990 to modernise the Brazilian economy according to the neoliberal recipe of global capitalism. This not only deeply affected the cinema industry but also resulted in mass emigration. A young student, Paco, becomes one of the migrants when he accepts to smuggle diamonds to Portugal. The journey to Europe is, in fact, part of his plan to go to his mother’s home town in Spain. In Portugal Paco encounters a young Brazilian woman, 21 There have been a total of 35 Lusophone co-productions between 1995 and 2008, 12 of which are Luso-African, 21 Luso-Brazilian and two Luso-Afro-Brazilian. 9 Alex, whose husband Miguel was killed by trying to outwit the smugglers. In a rebellious act she steels from Paco the violin in which the stones are being smuggled and sets off a chase in which Paco becomes the victim. In the open ending, Alex is driving across the border with the wounded Paco on her lap and it is unclear if they will make it to the ‘real’ Europe. The characters negotiate and articulate complex and contradictory perspectives on the issues of Lusophone brotherhood, linguistic ties and identity throughout the film. The avant-garde artist Miguel, for example, denigrates luso-tropicalism by calling Lisbon conceitedly a ‘cabaret of colonies’. He is a cynic whose music, in an obvious contrast to Tropicalism’s popularity, is not fashionable at all. He dislikes Portugal mainly for being economically and culturally underdeveloped; it is just a hole in the Fortress Europe through which he wants to make it into the richer countries. Conversely, his girlfriend Alex is completely disillusioned about Europe as the Promised Land and her desire to return home intensifies during the narrative. By stating that her Brazilian pronunciation creates frontiers rather than feelings of linguistic or cultural belonging, she demonstrates that Lusophony is a fraud. Alex most strongly expresses her frustration about Brazil as a country that went wrong. But, in contrast to Miguel, she does not blame the ancient coloniser but acknowledges respect for the courage of the colonial enterprise. The characters have in general no feelings of belonging to the former coloniser or its postcolonial imaginary, the Lusophone community, and they are quite conscious of the differences in linguistic terms. This is made evident in Paco’s relationship with Loli, a friendly Angolan character. Loli not only helps Paco but tries to make him aware of his self-pity by telling him about his people’s suffering during the civil war that followed Angola’s independence from Portugal. Paco feels rather bothered by him at first. The European descendant changes his approach when he feels in need of a friend. Their friendship develops during a conversation in which they joke about the different meanings of certain words and idiomatic expressions in Angolan, Brazilian and mainland Portuguese. But their bond does not last long and the cultural differences and prejudices come strongly to the fore. When his violin is taken away from him, Paco violently accuses the African of being the thief, unaware that his real antagonist is the Portuguese character Pedro. Pedro, a friend of Alex and Miguel, is the only character who reminds us of the sentimental relationships between Portugal and Brazil. He is in love with Alex and helps her out, thus betraying his friend Igor. When confronted with violence, he ends up betraying Alex as well. Evidently, there are no enduring bonds. The transnational antiques dealer Igor, who travels easily between the two continents and switches from a Brazilian to a Portuguese accent, is an unmistakable example of the fact that Lusophony is used as a means to take economic advantages. His dominion of the varying accents and grammars is rather a sign of opportunism and corruption than of closeness. It is also no coincidence that Igor keeps up the habit of smuggling diamonds in statues of saints or other cultural objects as was common during the colonial period. The sympathetic but conventional film Fintar o Destino offers a contrary discourse on Lusophony and linguistic belonging by revisiting Pedro Costa’s idea in Casa de Lava that the Cape Verde islands are a place where African and European culture embrace in brotherhood. Based on a true story and directed by Portuguese filmmaker Fernando Vendrell, its plot – mainly set on the island São Vicente – concentrates on a bar tender, Mané, who is unsatisfied with his culture – its laziness, lethargy, and alcohol consumption. When he was young, Mané was invited by one of Portugal’s most important soccer clubs, Benfica, to be a professional player but declined in order to marry and stay in his country. His life and marriage are now poisoned by his regrets and the feeling that his life is a failure. In order to give his life some meaning and believing strongly in Portugal as a better place, he travels to Lisbon where he wants to suggest to Benfica a young player who he coaches. Albeit the insistence in Portugal’s receptivity, borderless 10 communication in Portuguese and the absence of integration problems (Mané’s son is happily married to a white woman and perfectly at home in Lisbon; and his friend who went in his place to Portugal and now lives in poverty has himself and his bohemian lifestyle to blame), this journey makes Mané realize that he misses his country’ culture, its sociability and happiness. He returns from the trip in peace with himself and certain of the strong bond with Portugal. The main character’s plurilingualism – he speaks Creole and Portuguese with the same ease and chooses it according to the country he is in – and his sense of belonging to Portuguese culture (he was invited when Cape Verde was still an ultramarine province) – which make him travel and allow him to move with some ease in Lisbon (although he does not like the big city and is cheated on when purchasing a ticket for the season’s cup final) – extend at the end of the film into an acceptance of both cultures. While the film acknowledges their differences, it also emphasises the strong links (being the soccer club the strongest) that make it possible for Mané to encounter positive sides in his own culture. Since his idea that Portugal is the better place for soccer is not shattered, he insists that his young athlete leave the country and play at Benfica. Mané keeps on living the Lusophone dream of cultural harmony and linguistic unity: he believes that he and his successor can live in both worlds at the same time. It is quite striking that there are no references whatsoever to the Cape Verdean colonial history and fight for independence in Vendrell’s film and resentments towards Portuguese as official language are equally inexistent. While Nha Fala, a colourful and optimistic musical made by the Guinea-Bissauan filmmaker Flora Gomes, also develops a discourse on intercultural and linguistic exchange, it at least remembers one of the central figures of colonial resistance in what is now the PALOP, the Cape Verdean Amilcar Cabral. Quite the reverse of his earlier films like Udju azui di Yonta/Yonta’s Blue Eyes (1992) or Po di Sangui/Tree of Blood (1996), in which cultural conflicts are central to the narratives and Creole is the only language spoken, Gomes’ last film offers the possibility of overcoming obsolete African cultural elements like superstition, as well as European racism and ideas of superiority, in the encounter of African graciousness with Western language and technology. Although the two languages spoken in the film are Creole and French (instead of the official language Portuguese), the main character, the beautiful Vita, dominates French like her mother tongue and switches between them with ease, demonstrating the same cosmopolitism present in Fintar o Destino. Indeed, Vita, only finds her own voice, referred to in the title, as well as her identity as a woman after moving to France and by singing in its language. The film’s protagonist leaves Guinea Bissau in order to study in this richer European country that also co-produced the film. Before her departure, at the beginning of the film in which she says farewell to her family and friends, musical numbers – composed by famous Cameroon musician Manu Dibango – present the wide range of contemporary social problems that Guinea Bissau is facing: the difficulty in dealing with the memory of the heroic fight for independence, corruption, the coexistence of Animism and Catholicism, and the unemployment among young people with university degrees.22 The songs sung in Creole express the ambiguities that the young African nation is still facing after three decades of independence. In Paris, Vita falls in love with a French music producer. After their first night together Vita sings and thus breaks with an old family superstition which says that any female descendent of the family who sings will die. Singing in France has a completely different significance than singing in Guinea Bissau: not only does it express Vita’s new found freedom from obsolete traditions but it also implies financial success and independence. When she becomes a famous singer in Europe, Vita returns with her boyfriend and sound equipment to her home in order to deal with the offence. With the help of 22 The film was actually shot in Cape Verde due to the political conflicts in Guinea Bissau. 11 family and friends she stages her funeral, simultaneously respecting and transcending her mother’s belief in the superstition. According to its genre, the film portrays a vibrant and utopian Africa, which, by embracing European culture, becomes capable of constructing a hybrid identity. Notwithstanding its reference to Amilcar Cabral and his anti-colonialist resistance (his statue is carried around throughout the film and grows all the time), Portugal’s colonial presence in Africa is only shortly recalled through an eavesdropping Portuguese cleaner in Paris. This character stresses the country’s contemporary status as provider of cheap labour for rich European countries, and, in a very light fashion, the end of the hegemony of ancient colonisers. Vita is presented as a modern African woman who goes beyond her bilingual Creole/Lusophone background by speaking perfect French and conquering her place in the European music market. Neither language nor culture are obstacles and represent no boundaries. Everybody understands literally everybody, especially after the cultural problem of superstition is playfully overcome: Vita’s boyfriend does not speak but understands Creole and her mother understands but does not speak French. It is quite obvious that the choice of language and the inoffensive discourse on Afro-European harmony and easy linguistic encounter are thought to gain a greater European audience, especially the French market that has a long tradition of absorbing African art house cinema. Fado Blues by Luís Galvão Teles engages, like Terra Estrangeira, with three different Portuguese accents from Africa, Europe and South-America. Yet, in contrast, the comedy puts forward a Lusophone discourse that not only unites the former coloniser in harmony with the excolonies, but also attributes a paternalistic role model to Portugal. All the characters in the film have an allegorical dimension: the Brazilian Leonardo who works in a video store in Rio de Janeiro but wants to follow in the footsteps of his idol Reis, a Portuguese writer of detective stories; the African Amadeu who, in a neo-colonialist attitude is considered Portuguese although he has an African accent, and lives with Leonardo in Brazil because he wants to make big money but does not get far by cheating on tourists; Reis’s sensual daughter Lia with whom both young men fall in love but who only gives in to the equally white and more romantic Leonardo; and, finally, Reis, the father figure who does not want to assume his role but ends up uniting everybody in the goodhearted theft of a painting which had been stolen from Amadeu’s former boss and friend, Salvador, and is now worth a lot of money. According to another Lusophone myth, all the characters, including Lia, are ‘malandros’, inoffensive little crooks with a big heart. The story is as simple as its politics: Leonardo and Amadeu leave Brazil because it is a country with no economic perspective. Since they have Reis’s address they invade his property and meet Lia who suggests to her father the plan of the perfect robbery. They steal the painting on the night of the finals of the World Cup in which Portugal and Brazil dispute the title. Given the Lusophone discourse of the film it is no surprise that they manage to steal the painting – with the important intervention of Reis –, Portugal wins the World Cup and all the characters celebrate the Luso-Afro-Brazilian harmony under Portuguese patronage on the streets. It is important to add that the film is no satire at all, but, although it is a comedy, is serious in its perspective on Brazil as an economic fiasco and Portugal as the winning team in all instances. While Portugal embraces the other cultures – there is one light comment each to dismiss the factual discrimination of Brazilians and Africans (Leonardo’s accent and Amadeu’s skin colour) –, it is in fact superior, economically, culturally and even in terms of sports – which is the most absurd statement of them all. The wishful thinking of the film, in which all Africans are Portuguese – just like in colonial times –, and the Luso-Brazilian love-story are inevitable due to the unconditional Brazilian passion for its matrix, reflecting exactly the delirious Portuguese discourse that Eduardo Lourenço describes when he speaks about the factual absence of links 12 between Brazil and Portugal and the Portuguese perception of proximity with Africa. This ‘delirious’ discourse not only ignores reality but, particularly, the linguistic and cultural differences between the three continents involved (Lourenço 1999: 140-41). While there are slight cultural and especially economic differences, the Portuguese language is the glue that holds the characters together. This is especially manifest in the importance that Leonardo attributes to the literary skills of Reis, whose name reminds of one of the famous heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa. Um Tiro no Escuro, Leonel Vieira’s second film on migration, also presents elements of Portugal’s image of Brazil, although it offers a critique of the country itself. The film begins again in Brazil: a young woman, Veronica, leaves her four-month-old daughter for a moment with a stewardess on the airport toilet. The woman kidnaps the baby and we reencounter Veronica a year later in Lisbon in a stripper bar where she earns her living. After and during the shows she goes to the airport in order to spot the stewardess and thus find her child. The film is unclear on the reasons for her profession: we never know if she was a stripper before or if she chose to work exposing her body – as many female migrants – so that she has a chance to return to Brazil with her daughter. The melodrama turns into a crime movie when Veronica is fired and Carlos, the bar’s bodyguard takes her side and has to leave as well. His brother is a criminal who has just been released from prison and they end up forming a gang that starts robbing banks. As they are being hunted down by the police, the detective who is working on the case turns out to be the husband of the stewardess who kidnapped the baby and is finally spotted by Veronica at the airport. The suspense reaches a climax when the gang members shoot each other during the last robbery, which Veronica uses to mislead the detective and to get her daughter back. As a final twist, the detective reaches the airport just before boarding, recovers the child, realises his wrongdoings and returns the girl. Veronica can finally leave with her daughter for Brazil. Um Tiro no Escuro develops just like Tudo isto é Fado a stereotyped and strongly gendered idea of both Brazil and Portugal. However, the roles are now inverted: the Brazilian character is sensual (there are many scenes of Veronica stripping, taking a bath or having sex with Carlos), while the Portuguese are sterile, immoral and self-destructive (the stewardess and the detective lost their child and steal another one, the detective tries to use his position in order to conceal his wife’s crime, and the gangsters are not only ignorant machos, but also incompetent and end up killing one another). Whereas the comedy unites light-heartedly little crooks from three continents through language, Um Tiro no Escuro underlines (similar to Terra Estrangeira) the dark side of migrating from Brazil to Portugal as well as the power structure below the supposed unity. Accordingly, the cultural proximity suggested by the common language is questioned: literally, when Veronica’s accent is imitated by Carlos’ brother and the other gangster, and indirectly by her exploitation by the stewardess and later by the bar owner who demands 5,000 Euros in return for her passport. Although the film is submerged in platitudes, it has a point when it suggests that Brazilians are seen by the Portuguese with either envy (by women), or aggressive desire (by men). The supposed proximity between Portugal and Brazil only hides deep resentment and, in contrast to Tudo isto é Fado the film at least hints at the fact that the idea of economic and moral superiority expressed by the detective (‘Maria is much better off with us than with a stripper’) is an unconscious cover-up for both. CONCLUSION The Lusophone discourse is of Portuguese origin and possesses an unconsciously neo-colonialist character. This is to say, that it is a unilateral discourse directed from Portugal towards the other members of the Portuguese speaking community. It aims to guarantee the country’s place within 13 the world outside its small postcolonial territory. One of the conclusions that we can draw from the films analysed above is that this one-sided discourse has a hard time incorporating the topic (and reality) of migration. In all the Portuguese films language is no unifying factor at all and the majority of Luso-Brazilian films shares this perspective. Only the Luso-African films and one Luso-Brazilian production (Tudo isto é Fado) develop positive views on the possibility of AfroEuropean cultural bonds and easy plurilingual communication. In fact, from the eleven studied films only these three suggest that African and Brazilian migrants have a chance of being integrated into Portugal’s society. Indifferent to their nationality, supporting perspective or aesthetics (author films or blockbusters) the filmmakers of this study have no doubt that their migrants (both first and second generation) are not welcomed or are either marginalised or feel alienated. In three cases migration to Portugal (or being a descendant from migrants) is actually fatal (Os Mutantes, Zona J and Terra Estrangeira. The Portuguese film productions have a pessimistic perspective on the possibility of integrating the second generation of migrants from Africa into Portuguese culture, even though language is no obstacle at all. The reasons for exclusion and alienation are to be found elsewhere: in the loss of traditional values (No Quarto da Vanda), racism (Os Mutantes, Zona J) and machismo in the Cape Verdean community (Ossos). Pedro Costa presents, indeed, quite different perspectives on language. In Casa de Lava he shows that the Portuguese, in sharp contrast to all other Cape Verdean characters in his films, are capable of adapting to another culture and language, albeit initial resistance. When plurilingualism is a cultural given, as in the case of the Cape Verdeans, it has varying effects. While for the first generation of migrants being bilingual becomes a symptom of alienation from the native culture (Juventude em Marcha), the second generation learns to deal with this double identity from film to film: at first plurilingualism expresses female discrimination (Ossos), then marginalisation and, by ignoring the African language, also a sign of alienation (No Quarto da Vanda); yet, in the last film, it is a sign of increasing adaptation as well as of an acceptance of one’s roots (Vanda in Juventude em Marcha). Both Luso-African productions, one by a Portuguese filmmaker and one by an internationally acclaimed African director, show how the European languages and the contact with its cultures empower their characters who become able to enjoy their respective cultures more fully after the intercultural exchange and due to their plurilingualist skills. The Luso-Brazilian productions are less lighthearted: only one comedy, made by a Portuguese filmmaker believes in Lusophone harmony, while the other two (one Portuguese and one Brazilian director) have a much more pessimistic – and perhaps more realistic – perspective on multicultural encounters. Interestingly, all three Luso-Brazilian co-productions deal with crime, thus echoing either playfully or with a dark tone the history of offences and the breaking of laws that are part of the shared colonial history (one can think of slavery, exploration, Indian genocide, Inquisition, etc.). Only once are the different cultures and languages seen as being compatible and the migrant characters as successful in striving for a better life in Portugal (Tudo isto é Fado). Linguistic and cultural differences are either mentioned (Um Tiro no Escuro) or explored (Terra Estrangeira), but always shatter the Lusophone dream by indicating a deep divide between Africa, Brazil and Portugal. Co-productions are no guarantee for multilateral views on the complex bonds and historical relationships between Portugal and its ex-colonies that make Africans and Brazilians choose to migrate. Despite the multiplicities of perspectives on Lusophony and the overriding critical stance, many films still look for harmony and – one might guess – box-office success. Others distrust the old myths but take rescue with stereotypes. The Portuguese productions, dominated by Pedro Costa, are, on the other hand, almost too sure about difference and exclusion. There are 14 few films, Terra Estrangeira, Os Mutantes and Juventude em Marcha, that can be considered as being the finest examples of a cinema that is trying to come to terms with the burden of Lusophony. REFERENCES Barros, E. de (n. d.), ‘Sangue novo no celulóide’, in: HTTP: http://www.insituto-amoes.pt/arquivos/cinema/sangcine.htm (3 February 2004). Ferreira, C. O. (2006), ‘The Limits of Luso-Brazilian Brotherhood – Fortress Europe in the Film Foreign Land’, in: Third Text, 20.6, 733-743. Ferreira, C. O. (2005), ‘The Adolescent as Post-colonial Allegory: Strategies of Intersujectivity in Recent Portuguese Cinema’, in: Camera Obscura, 59, 35-71. Ferreira, C. O. (2007), ‘No future – The Luso-African generation in Portuguese Cinema’, in: Studies in European Cinema 4.1, 49-60. Gardnier, R. (2006), ‘Pedro Costa, Juventude em Marcha’, in: HTTP http://www.contracampo.com.br/82/festjuventudeemmarcha.htm (14 December 2008). Krivochein, B. (2007), ‘Juventude em Marcha de Pedro Costa’, in: HTTP http://www.zetafilmes.com.br/criticas.asp?id=328 (14 December 2008). Lourenço, E. (1999), A Nau de Ícaro seguido de Imagem e Miragem da Lusofonia, Lisbon: Gradiva. Malheiros, J. (2002), ‘Portugal Seeks Balance of Emigration, Immigration’, in: HTTP http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=77 (10 January 2010). Ribeiro, M. C. (2004), Uma História de Regressos. Império, Guerra Colonial e Pós-colonialismo, Porto: Ediçõs Afrontamento. Santos, B. S. (2001), ‘Entre Prospero e Caliban’, in: Ramalho, M. I. & A. Sousa Riberio (eds.), Entre Ser e Estar – Raízes, percursos e discursos de identidade, Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 23-85. 15