This is a serialized 'Romeo & Juliet'-type period melodrama in six episodes, totaling nearly five hours; the last installment was marred somewhat by bad cable reception, which has unfortunately plagued a number of titles in my retrospective honoring writer/director Oliveira's upcoming 100th birthday. A deliberately low-key and theatrical approach results in static film-making (mostly confined to interiors) and a verbose script (being literally a picturization of the source novel previously brought to the screen in 1943) which, however, effectively emphasizes the piece's inherently intimate nature. Interestingly, its combination of classical music (Handel), constant narration and tableaux-like imagery had also been a distinguishing feature of Stanley Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON (1975).
The teenage off-springs of two rival families fall in love; they're kept apart by their obstinate and duty/tradition-bound parents. Eventually, an act of violence (the boy kills the girl's cousin, for whom she only has contempt but whom her father is adamant that the heroine should marry) dooms their romance; the hero ends up in prison while the girl's sent to a convent, eventually gets sick and dies. To complicate matters further, the attractive but mild-mannered daughter of an underling of the boy's family who takes care of him when ambushed by his rival for the heroine's affections (a lengthy scene in Episode 2 which is so dark that one can hardly see anything throughout!) also falls for him. When her father is killed and the boy's exiled, she accompanies him; however, unable to live without his true love, he too succumbs to illness during the voyage and, in a scene strikingly shot in slow-motion, his servant/admirer follows him into the ocean when the coffin is buried at sea!
Each episode is introduced by a straight-to-camera summation of preceding events by the hero's younger sister (who, however, barely figures at all in the ensuing narrative). Obviously, the film can be hard-tack for most viewers given its extreme length (myself included); still, the classical plot generally holds the interest and, in any case, one has to admire the effort not only in undertaking such an essentially archaic but ambitious venture in the late 1970s but pulling it off with this kind of singularly rigorous (and personal) treatment.
