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In this restrained tale of bittersweet love, 100 year-old director Manoel de Oliveira puts younger practitioners to shame with his sure-handed but playful sense of cinema, says Nick Riddle.

In Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, a young accountant falls in love with a mysterious girl, and suffers torments and poverty in order to win her, only to come a cropper.

The setting is, or seems to be, present-day Lisbon, but the story - adapted by veteran director Manoel de Oliveira from a 19th-century Portuguese novel - is shot through with old-world morality and atmosphere. Formal soirees take place in exquisite oak-panelled drawing rooms; the young man’s marriage plans are thwarted by his uncle’s disapproval; the girl stands at her window with an antique fan, like a figure from the age of courtly love. These deliberate anachronisms, and the spare, stately presentation, lend a gently surreal air to the film.

Its short running time and restrained performances seem completely appropriate: the narrator’s melancholy tale needs no adornment. Oliveira, who at 102 is now the world’s oldest working film director (and who has already made two more films since this one), puts many younger practitioners to shame with his sure-handed but playful sense of cinema.

 

Nick Riddle on 24th May 2011
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