Autumn review – amazing landscape plays central role in Portuguese wine-family drama
This wistful Portuguese film is a pointillist portrait of a nuclear family over the course of an eventful year; it has plenty of earthy flavour, perhaps like the wine the paterfamilias of the story, Otávio (Miguel Frazão), produces on his small plot in hills above the Douro river. In oenological terms, you can really taste the terroir – the land on which it's made – with notes of nostalgia and melancholy and a tangy, slightly humorous spice. But there's also maybe a touch too much sweetness in the blend, given writer and director Antonio Sequeira's script occasionally slips into a tannic, sentimental theatricality. If it weren't for the fact that the stunning landscape plays such an integral part in the film's atmosphere you'd assume that this must have started as a stage play given the tidy scene breaks, dividing the story into four consecutive seasons.
In the first act, Otávio and his wife, Susana, (Elsa Valentim) are busy preparing to say goodbye to their eldest child Tomas (Salvador Gil), who is about to go off to university in London. As Tomas packs and Susana fusses trying to find the mislaid bongos he wants to bring with him, Otávio comforts himself by treading his grape harvest with his own feet – an old-school method that could be done in seconds, as Tomas says, if he hired in some equipment. Younger sister Belinha (Beatriz Frazao, who does the most convincing job of ageing over the course of the movie), worries about surviving the coming year with her annoying parents without Tomas around to take some of the heat. The act ends, like each of the subsequent segments, with the family seeing Tomas off on the train. By the spring, he's back home with a new girlfriend (Krupa Narci Givane) whose Portuguese is not good enough to understand Otávio's racist jokes, much to the younger characters' relief.
So this study in mild generational conflict goes on, in which no one is really a bad guy, not even Otávio for all his maladroit joshing. The dialogue is pretty conventional, although perhaps more expressive or interesting for native Portuguese speakers, while for the most part Sequeira doesn't try anything too tricksy. That said, there's one striking flashback to when Otávio and Susana were young (played by Ricardo de Sa and Sara Barradas), and we see them age up to the present over a series of deft edits in which every time Susana is carrying Tomas: first a baby, then as he grows older until poor Valentim is carrying the fully adult Gil piggyback, as an apt symbol of a mother's self-imposed martyrdom. A few more expressive touches like this might not have gone amiss, but as it stands Autumn is a sturdy if not especially distinguished work.
Autumn is on digital platforms in the UK from 2 June and in the US from 3 June.
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