“Terrible is the word ‘NO’ ” according to the well-known sermon by António Vieira, a 17th-century Portuguese priest and preacher, evoked in the first frame before the credits. A terrible word for an inexhaustible movie: the right or wrong side, upright or upside down, it will always be a ‘NO’, no matter where we read it. Let us not hesitate, let us be bold: entering into Oliveira’s work requires confronting, before any other, his most desired, most obscure film, the one that puts us face to face with irreparable collective destiny. In Africa, Cabrita, a lieutenant in the Portuguese army in the middle of the Colonial War, tells his platoon the story of the Portuguese in terms of their greatest defeats. This story, you understand, is a nightmare.
A hallucination. A mystic project that will be completed by the unknown eye seeing the narrator bleed to death on the morning of April 25, 1974, before Oliveira’s voice abruptly takes its place. It is the day of the Carnation Revolution, also the end of an Empire so dreamy and so crazy that it has probably never been inhabited by either reality or fiction. From then on, no Portuguese epic will any longer be eligible. Vain is the glory of command. Who are we, where are we, the lost Portuguese people, since the tree of origins that opens the film and hides the transcendence of all our myths? Oliveira had warned us: “Without No, all my work would be incomplete. “Eternal return, without beginning or end, also of the filmmaker who revisits his own work and that of four of his favourite writers: Camões, Camilo Castelo Branco, Teixeira Pascoaes and Don Quixote. The meeting takes place on a bench below his home in Porto: O Velho do Restelo. His final film, shot last year in a time of crisis absolutely detrimental to the Portuguese cinema, has nothing testamentary, ladies and gentlemen: he just wants to start from scratch. (FF)