Vai-e-vem (Come and Go), from Portugal's João César Monteiro - a film that stares back at the audience

By Gabe Klinger

João César Monteiro died this year at age 64 from cancer. The director kept his illness under wraps, no doubt to ensure the safe completion of what would become his final film, Vai-e-vem. An article appearing in Portugal’s Público newspaper claims the script was completed before he was diagnosed, however Monteiro’s close collaborators speak of a premonition of death which never escaped the film’s initial treatment, continuing onto the set and into the editing (which took place in Paris earlier this year). Rita Pereira Marques, who plays Adrianna in the film, observes that the Vai-e-vem of the title, translated roughly as “coming and going”, may originate from Monteiro’s compulsive behavior prior to and during the shoot. In her words, “Like a painter in front of a blank canvas, cleaning his already clean brushes, a coming and going in order to combat angst.”

With Vai-e-vem, Monteiro has left a time capsule, the preserved stare of a director easily overlooked at festivals and archival showings (none of his films have been released in the U.S.), and a cine-egotist that worked to the tip of perfection. A lunatic, said the Portuguese mainstream (in the land of de Oliveira’s, is there such a thing?) His films are overseen by Paulo Branco, whose production chain has enabled at least half a dozen films just in 2003 with similar esoteric attributes. Monteiro, unlike most, may have enjoyed obscurity just as much as he enjoyed intimidation through taboo subjects such as pedophilia and racial stereotyping. One way of looking at his films is that you are an uninvited guest at bad dinner party whose host is unabashedly self-centered and imposing of his views on politics, women and football.

For a director who on the surface seems so autocratic – there’s barely a moment in Vai-e-vem when the auteur/acteur isn’t in center-frame and speaking – there’s also virtually no one else in cinema that has characterized himself so intimately and patiently as Monteiro. The result is not a cinema of seconds; his films do not set out to entertain us any more than they ask us to learn from the characters. Monteiro works by the hour, and it’s only in the final third of Vai-e-vem’s 179 minutes that the film’s true glory emerges.

Vuvu and Vai-e-vem. Monteiro’s latest alter-ego, João Vuvu, is a hair’s breadth away from the character that launched his performance track record, “João de Deus”. With his 90 pound frame and sickly complexion, Monteiro famously plays on his physical vulnerability as Deus; in God’s Comedy (1995), a neighborhood butcher raises his knife to João and demands he lower his pants; when João refuses, he ends up in the hospital, where a nurses mutters, “This one won’t make it through the night.” The character João de Deus – simply, John of God – is meant to be holy, the continuation of a filmmaker who claimed to be Catholic. In God’s Wedding, João is asked by a nun if he is a believer. He pretends to be miffed by the query, dispensing these words of wisdom: “It’s not a question of believing; it’s a question of trust – god is obscure.” In other words, Monteiro asks us to retain our own beliefs while viewing his version of god (just as he would in a like situation). Monteiro as Vuvu – never before as God-like as in Vai-e-vem – is a fountain of curiosity: conspicuously inessential in his surroundings, he is barely an employer to the maids who clean his apartment (he pays minimum wage) and not much of a father to his recently-imprisoned embezzler son (who he throws over a ledge for not retaining any of his stolen dough). The latter subplot is lifted from the W.C. Fields short, The Fatal Glass of Beer. Other movie references come in the form of playful jokes – a bus advertisement that reads “Some Came Rambling”, the word “Rosebud” spoken prior to one of cinema’s most exaggerated off-screen sadomasochistic acts, and finally, the greatest prolonged close-up of an eye since 2001.

There is little plot involved, as one typically expects from Monteiro. The elderly Vuvu rides bus # 100 up and down Lisbon much in the manner a bored retiree would, visiting parks and taking the bus back to his apartment in the evening hours. The information that we have on Vuvu is not exactly contingent on any of the events that occur: he is a widower and an intellectual with a great library though he has not read any of his books (he claims that they are there merely to keep him company). He brings into his community the cultural inheritance of one hundred world ambassadors, from Portuguese Noble-prize winners to Chinese blow-job technique. Vuvu is outspoken and controversial but he has the advantage of being a gentlemen with a calm rhetoric. If any of the information he monologues to us (all unsolicited) is faulty, we certainly have no reason to doubt it as it does not serve to render the plot in any way. Rather it is used as a connotative gesture, and it’s cumulative effect is observed more subtly. The deliberate inclusion of black-African bus-riders in every one of Vuvu’s excursions, for example, has not been noted in any article I have read though it almost certainly has something to do with the character’s travails to Ethiopia, which are only alluded to. Also, but no less tangentially, Monteiro seems to be placing himself in direct contrast with a minority that feels similarly outcast and forlorn in the big city.

Visual artifacts seem to offer the same. For example, an abstract, Bacon-esque painting in Vuvu’s pad suggests a woman’s clitoris, making his solitary encounters with the young maids who come to his apartment feel even more pornographic. Monteiro removes the character’s motivation so that he is simply a fanatical aesthete who never acts on his fantasies (only late in the film does he become sexual). Corresponding to this idea, a scene with Monteiro regular Manuela de Freitas was reportedly shot over and over again until they didn’t appear to be characters in a film. They were disembodied from any story, and so just two people interacting, simply and without moral implication. From the very first scene Monteiro tries to foil us with his motivations, dropping a cow liver into a swarm of pigeons and meeting the immediate disapproval of another park visitor. “Don’t you know they don’t eat liver?” says the man, to which Vuvu (in what will become his characteristic tick) simply shrugs and runs off. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. But Vuvu’s intuitiveness is thinly masked by his poker-faced ingenuity. In the end he will incite enough embarrassment and pain to drive any mortal human to their death. Before we get there, Monteiro will ride this slow bus back and forth, coming and going, until our senses are numb, our brains full, and this character has been lived with.

Monteiro and the black hole. In Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (Snow White), made in 2000 and directly preceding Vai-e-vem, the filmmaker had dropped us one hell of a doozy on the subject of death. The film opens with the corpse of Swiss author Robert Walser (who brought back the tale of Snow White in a famously delirious poem), seen in a still image; the ensuing 70 minutes is almost exclusively black screen, with spoken dialogue and erratic sound effects. Interestingly, Monteiro’s decision to forego any images came after the casting, costuming and set construction. But it wasn’t a conscientious decision; apparently, it was out of necessity. He had “blacked-out”, there were no images he could bring himself to shoot.

If Branca de neve is outwardly black, Vai-e-vem is a gradual submersion into darkness. The films act as sister-pieces: Branca de neve being the physical end to his career, and Vai-e-vem the spiritual return – the last sigh so to speak. It’s very much a posthumous film and Monteiro has revolutionized his personal conception of cinema in one shot: a final freeze on João’s eye that lasts for several minutes. It’s in this shot that we realize the character of Vuvu and Deus and Monteiro are gone, as well as the inconsequence of his sordid sexual dilemmas. Perhaps Monteiro wishes to remind us that it’s not important how you die, no matter how incredulous; death is already a silly affair (as proved in the silent film-within-the-film in which Vuvu presses himself against the unyielding lips of a young girl’s corpse, mid-funeral). Monteiro’s character takes as his “mechanism” of death the augmented appearance of a political system far beyond his reach, one he may have explained to us in one his monologues. In plain words, Vuvu acts on his first sexual fantasy and asks one of his maids to insert a giant black dildo up his ass. And after its surgical removal, a monument to George W. Bush is mounted using the gargantuan object. In the world of Vai-e-vem, the best and most prolonged gag will also become a sad harness into the hero’s penchant for self-inflicted tragedy.

As the movie draws to a close, this becomes just another story, already filed away. But getting back to the eye for a moment. After his release from surgery, Vuvu takes a walk under a tree – a sprawling, beautifully aged natural object of the kind Monteiro has placed himself next to in several of his features – and is spoken to by an angel who sits atop the branches. Is this divine person hovering from all the trees in Monteiro’s films? The angel disappears in the film’s first and only dissolve. Immediately we cut into the image of the eye, which reflects the tree (the ultimate example of Monteiro’s detail-oriented filmmaking). The eye looks back at us as though it has escaped the film and the audience is still trapped in it. The eye looks and asks us to consider what we have seen before we are even allowed to leave our seats. The eye expresses sincerity and longing. The eye tells us we were being observed all along. The eye tells us we are the lucky ones. Indeed, Mr. Monteiro. 

A personal addendum: I have only seen two Monteiro films theatrically (at film festivals) – they were Branca de neve and Vai-e-vem, and the circumstances were so that I regard them as two of my most memorable moviegoing experiences. Branca was enhanced by the fact that the audience was put into a state of hysteria by the film (the festival catalogue did a good job in getting around describing its non-imagery) and Vai-e-vem was especially memorable to me because I met a group of strangers after the screening who had never seen a film by Monteiro (or anything comparable from the looks) and were generous enough to engage me in a lively discussion over food and drinks. As our night advanced, the conversation rarely strayed from the film, and one comment, from a young Toronto native, seemed to resonate with everyone. His words: “I was ready to write that off as one of the worst things I’ve ever seen…but after discussing it, I feel lucky to have seen it.”