Meus Amigos

By the time it was premiered, right after Portugal had put an end to its dictatorship (in 1974), Cunha Telles is supposed to have said: "This is no masterpiece; but, then again, it's no time for masterpieces yet".

Well, I don't consider it a masterpiece but it conveys such a nostalgic feeling of hopeful and enthusiastic times gone (in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution) that I wouldn't want to overlook.

The film tries to capture the the political commitment and social engagement that those rousing and idealistical times produced in (even) the common people. All the characters are politically and socially well-informed - a reason to which might well be that they are literate cultivated middle class students or independent workers at home (like the main character who does translating and news writing).

Although this may feel like a contradiction to what has been said above, they all seem lost and freely-wandering people with loose reference points in a constantly and unexpectedly changing society. But that's the whole fascination (and reality) of post-revolutionary settings (check the post-revolutionary Soviet Union of the years 1917-1920s, before the grimness of Stalin's era).

There are great existential dialogues and realistically-shot long sequences (in a typical Portuguese "cervejaria", in a capitalist-owned mansion now occupied by left-wing would be squatters and walking on a Lisbon street by the river, just to mention a few).