O dia do desespero

Manoel de Oliveira often spoke of the great importance of his 1975 film Benilde Or A Mãe Virgem: the one, he said, where he learned to “fix”. And what did he fix in O Dia do Desespero? The answers are many. Firstly, a dialogue, it is sure, with Amor de Perdição shot fourteen years before. Pieces are cited here. Then a dialogue with its author, Camilo Castelo Branco (who wrote O Dia do Desespero) filmed in Camilo’s house, recounts the last days when, almost blind, he is driven to suicide through not being able to write. But there are other equally important elements that O Dia Do Desespero also fixes: the portrait of the writer and his despair, in the midst of the credits, at the moment he collapsed before the long shot of a wheel of a cart bearing terrible news; a portrait of a highly documented historical truth, reconstructed through fiction; finally, once again, the portrait of the actors who play Camilo and his wife Ana Plácido, Simão and Teresa, the characters from Amor de Perdição, as well as themselves. “I am Mario Barroso…”, “I am Teresa Madruga…”. This is a film with a Portuguese soul that obsessed Oliveira and which Camilo kept within himself in his perdition. A film of double and triple images in space and time. A film of a story shot by its ghosts and the ghosts of cinema, as many years later we would see in a movie filmed ten years before, the posthumous Visita Memórias or e Confissões. Considering all these issues, there is no Oliveira film more enigmatic than O Dia do Desespero.
(FF)