AGOSTO

No instante da partida
há sempre uma demora
não do tempo - da vida

(At the moment of flight
there is always a delay
not of time - of life)
Jorge de Sena

From a passage—halfway¹—spoke Jorge Silva Melo’s first film, a passage between so many things and towards so many things. Then, he told us that no one, twice². His third film centered itself on a precise month, the pinnacle of summer. Agosto in the country and Agosto at the beach, Agosto in the north and Agosto in the south, Agosto in the Minho’s arraiais³ and Agosto in the seafront of Arrábida. And it is said—I’ve heard it said—that the sweetest light is the light of summer dawns in Minho and is the light of summer dusks in Arrábida.

But if the other films were films of passage they were also films of stoppage. “Life passes by and in passing consists”, wrote another Poet⁴. By consisting, it stops. And the characters in the double fictions of Passagem or the characters in the double regressions of Ninguém Duas Vezes were stopped, waiting. In this waiting, they passed by.

In Agosto there is and isn’t the same movement. The characters pass by—would it be better to say pass through?—and become, similarly, stopped. But this passage comes less from them—erring between various interchangeable points—than from the space and time that surrounds them, nimbussing them in a halo of immobility. Much time—some time—had passed between the various journeys and the various memories of the previous films. In this one, everything fits in a summer and a single month of it: Agosto. And although the country is traversed (from north to south, from the countryside to the beach) everything happens, or everything happens not, in a summer. A summer past (in the synopsis of the film, the action is placed in 1964) but not at all abruptly. A detained summer, immobilized in memory, a summer that can be repeated not, though it is repeated in everything that defines it as summer. Two friends that have been so for at least ten years—ten years ago one of them offered the other a lighter—find each other again and lose each other. While they become fixed. In this month, called Agosto. What story does the film called Agosto tell? Strictly it does not tell any story. Or it tells three stories, all told by Alda. The first is the one of that lady (Glícinia Quartin) who passed the summer in Arrábida every summer. She used to pass them with her husband. Then, the husband died. Now she passes them alone. She reads a book, always has a book to read, goes to the beach, crosses paths with the protagonists and, now and then, says her good mornings to them. Later, she tells another story about the same lady, a story that Alda and the director forgot to tell us when they told the first story. The thing is, her husband was an aviator and, when he couldn’t come, he would fly over the beach, very very low, and throw roses to her. It is Alda who tells the third story to Carlos’ ears. We understand from the end of the sentence what we didn’t hear of its beginning. Alda will have a child in the spring. In March. We do our math (but no one does it) and we come to know that she’s already been three months pregnant that Agosto, in that summer.

I understand perfectly well that people will tell me—and will tell the director—that none of these stories are any story at all. At most, the first ones are vaguely sad and the last one vaguely happy. But there aren’t any other stories to tell. There’s the story of Alberto, the story of Nina, the story of Emílio, the story of Rodrigo, perhaps I might be forgetting two or three more. But we don’t come to know much about them. Alberto isn’t exactly being paid by Nina, it isn’t clearly known why he’s there, he escaped just as he could’ve not escaped. Perhaps he had very much fallen in love with Alda, on the night of the party, when she stopped dancing with him or he stopped dancing with her. Perhaps he’ll suffer a lot—as Alda says at a certain point—perhaps not. For Nina, we remain without knowing if we should feel very sorry, or not at all. She tells us, at the end, with a stupid face, that happy people seem very stupid and we also aren’t sure that the moral of the story (hers or others) boils down to so much or so little. Emílio was in the war, was jealous of his wife, returned to kill her, was arrested, the wife went into a coma. We’re already familiar with this story, there are many Portuguese films about it. One could call it a fait divers or a case of passion. Rodrigo had various wives, some brought him avocados from Africa, others threw these avocados overboard.

Am I forgetting the so-called protagonists? I’m not. But if Carlos was imagining things that was on him. None of what he imagined happened. But what he imagined didn’t pass by either. It lasted. Agosto lasted. And Dário and Alda didn’t imagine anything. They saw. The summer. They lived and lasted the summer. They didn’t come from anywhere, they didn’t go anywhere. If there was an argument it was in Carlos’ head. In his head—said Jorge Silva Melo—“turns the (ingenuous and perverted) mechanism of a scriptwriter. Incapable of placing himself before things without transforming their signs into suspicions and arising in him the temptation of manipulation”.

And us? Would we be capable of placing ourselves before things, before bodies, before the Minho, before Arrábida, before a conservatoire exam, before a party, before a white house at night, in the light of the fireworks, or before the blue and transparent Arrábida sea, with the Pedra da Anicha in the background? Would we be capable of stopping before these images and of seeing them as mere images?

A film of passage and a film of stoppages, Agosto presents this challenge to us, which I shall also call ingenuous and perverted. Ingenuous because it believed, in those final years of the ‘80s, that it was still possible for spectators, who have already turned into decipherers and editors, to merely look at the beauty of the world and at the light of summer. And, like the aviator, tossing those roses on them and thus loving them in low flight. Perverted, because it doesn’t believe in this miraculous innocence and provokes us with the culture capable of deflecting it. The culture that offers us signs at the same time as it removes them and that tells us, in free translation, that, if everything is a sign, maybe we are signs too. And it doesn’t even finish the verse in English or in irony.

“A minute of the world is passing by. It must be painted in its reality.” It is almost with this sentence (from Cézanne, quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the book “Sens et Non-Sens” that we see several times) that the film begins. First perverted sign. It is a sign of culture (démodée on top of that, like Albert Béguin’s book “L’Âme Romantique et le Rêve” which is also quoted) and this culture will never again manifest itself in such an ostentatious and provocatory manner, with which it’s placed in epigraph. And it’s also a deceptive sign, because there are 97 minutes of life from the world that have stopped and weren’t painted in any reality.

They live from their own succession, they live to pass by, stopped and to stop passing by. Or to stop thought over, if you’d like to believe that I’m not being carried by plays on words⁵, but by plays on images.

This film of Jorge Silva Melo’s is the “song of the perfect friend”. Each sequence carries off-screen the refrain of Sena’s poem (not what I quoted in the epigraph, another one)⁶, which says “do you still remember them, tell me, O friend of mine?”. And, like in that poem, there is a light and subtle variation on this coda. Sometimes it’s demonstrative (“do you still remember this one?”), sometimes supplicating (“tell me”), sometimes, at the end, accusatory: “do you know that you took her, O friend of mine?”.

Why is it recognized and given to the poets, the painters or the musicians, the possibility of being so secretive and so clear, while we want to refuse it to the men of rhyme, of images and sounds that are or should be the filmmakers?

No one has explained it to me yet. But the refusal—or blindness—before the order of the sublime in Agosto can only originate from this interdict. In whom it does not exist (but in whom does it not exist at least a little?), the evidence of this bright Agosto is, as it is, luminous.

And in this light, the characters of the film become almost incandescent with mystery, they come covered in creams and veils as Nina does, or they come, like Alda, in the final sequence, formed by a loose skirt fluttering from the north wind of Arrábida, with neither of her hands trying to prevent the skirt from lifting.

They are the images that remain for a long time in our memory. A body swimming. A stern face emerging from the darkness. A glance thrown steeply on a black bathing suit and the one who inhabits it. Fireworks or balloons at night. A moment to let love go, a moment to retain it. And the one who takes its time isn’t time, it’s life.

One day, one summer day, one August day, a woman’s bloody body (may God forgive her) is put in a taxi, which we see in all the depth of field and of night. The taxi pulls away and is dazzlingly, magnificently followed—in what can only be called a raccord—by the green of Arrábida’s sea. In a corner, someone echoes something along the lines of “horrible story”. But we’re already on to another dive.

If I should die and you should remain. Time passes by and in passing consists. Oblique plongée over a woman in a boat. You’re going away. I’m going away. Summer is already over. Six sentences to translate Agosto in broken-foot rhyme. It’s in the film (even the broken foot). Learn to see it. And if you should see too much or too little, the film isn’t capable of speaking with you. And of making you see, in the wind that blows in Arrábida, the blowing of the wind of separation. Glances crossing “over the locations, over the sequences, over the actions (...) As if the spirits or people were speaking to one another over the props”. Exactly as Jorge Silva Melo said. Exactly as Jorge Silva Melo filmed.