HOVERING OVER THE WATER

João César Monteiro (1939-2003) endures as one of the most provocative and influential figures of Portuguese cinema. At once a dandy and a pauper, a hedonist and a monk, a revolutionary and a classicist, a realist and a romantic, Monteiro was an artist of profound contradictions. His films are an unholy marriage: a wicked burlesque sensibility wed to the formal rigor of a high modernist, shot through with a poet’s delight in the reveries of language and music. Pinching from the high and the low, he synthesized the avant-garde with a popular spectacle; his work is “an intervention in public life,” a revolt against decency and established order. As a frequent performer in his own films, Monteiro struck an indelible onscreen presence. In the guise of his signature alter ego, João de Deus, he embodied a ribald mischief-maker recalling both Jerry Lewis and Erich von Stroheim, the clown and the devil wrapped into one. Bringing a touch of madness to all that he did, Monteiro's cinema is fueled by a gourmand appetite for life in all its sordid and sumptuous variety. Now, thanks to this monumental restoration effort, his body of work can rightly be appreciated as one of the most astonishing achievements of 20th-century filmmaking.

HOVERING OVER THE WATER
One of the most underseen films in Monteiro’s career is also one of his most beautiful. In an implicit homage to Piero della Francesca and the Italian Renaissance (beautifully photographed by Acácio de Almeida), Laura Morante stars as a Tuscan translator who returns to Portugal with her children one year after her husband died on the country’s sun-drenched southern coast. As the ghost of her husband haunts their home’s white walls, the whole region is on edge after the assassination of Issam Sartawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization who had travelled there. When she finds a wounded man (Philip J. Spinelli) drifting by the beach, a tortured, sensual attraction grows between them while political violence, conspiracies, and personal grief weigh on the fragile possibilities of a new love.