NEW/OLD: Our Beloved Month of August
August is over. Time to watch a movie about it.
Earlier this year, Alonso and I saw and reviewed “Grand Tour,” the latest film from Portuguese writer-director Miguel Gomes. Both of us loved it, so I went hunting for earlier films from Gomes that I hadn’t yet seen.
“Our Beloved Month of August” (2008) takes its title from a song, performed late in the film, and takes its form from both ethnographic documentary and the history of movies that are themselves about the making of movies.
Gomes plays a version of himself, the director of a film set in a small mountain community in Portugal. His crew, also seen on camera (and over a charming closing-credits sequence) is scouting locations, casting locals to play characters, and at times befuddling the citizens who have no idea what kind of movie this is all supposed to become.
It’s a hybrid documentary/fictional narrative of disparate images, threads that at first seem unrelated: local bands play traditional romantic dance music, singers sing lyrics that echo if not directly mirror the lives of the people in the town, and an annual Lenten Carnaval takes shape. A man who claims a special place in that celebration describes his special talent, which is, he says, hurling himself off a tall bridge into the river below.
Film producers are increasingly annoyed by the unorthodox shooting methods of Gomes and his team. Boars are slaughtered, teenagers fall in love, an improvised sing-off reflects interpersonal battle lines and turns into something of a cruel roast, an idiosyncratically local newspaper is printed, a man mourns the mysterious loss of his wife, and Belgian college boys show up to sweep the local girls off their collective feet. There's more, of course, and all of it happens at once as stories overlap and take shape.
This late-summer setting is, historically, one in which filmmakers explore endings: of romances, of traditions, of essential places. But this isn't an elegy; it's a snapshot of a moment. And with the exception of a few characters, no one here save for the film crew is going anywhere. September will come, quietly, and all the lives and activities on display will continue apace because the people of the town make it so.
It's a tranquil juggling act, one that Gomes makes feel almost effortless. And because he would appear to shoot first and script later, every “plot” element (if you’re opposed to the school of Nothing Happens, go watch something else) gently collides with the others, amplifying them, deepening their meaning, and building a coherent story: of the ways people agree to construct a plain-spoken collective narrative of community, of ways of living and belonging, and, for some, of individually constructed, interior plans for moving forward.
[“Our Beloved Month of August” is available on DVD from Cinema Guild, and currently streaming on Kanopy, along with a few other films from Gomes.]
