Come and Go
(Vai e Vem)
With Rita Durão, João César Monteiro, Manuela de Freitas.
Portugal/France, 2003, DCP, color, 175 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.
DCP source: Cinema Guild
Driven by his struggle against the illness that would ultimately prove fatal, Monteiro fervently devoted himself to his deeply personal last work, a musically structured meditation on spirituality and desire in which he heroically cast himself in the lead role as an eccentric libertine drifting wide-eyed through a sun-drenched Lisbon. A consciously terminal film, Come and Go offers a poetic summation of Monteiro’s fascination with the body as the most irreverent and mysterious of temples, staging a series of playfully austere encounters between the visibly infirm and prematurely aged director and the women with whom he engages in erotic, linguistic and theological debates.
A commissioned work in a series on prominent Portuguese artists and writers, Monteiro’s directorial debut is a moving documentary portrait of the celebrated poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner, set in her beloved and luminous Algarve, where Monteiro would return years later to film Hovering Over the Water. Dedicated to Carl Theodor Dreyer, the short announced Monteiro’s desire to make his mark in cinema by channeling its connection to poetry and the other arts.