The first in Oliveira's celebrated "Tetrology of Thwarted Love," The Past and the Present offers both a dark vision of amour fou and an excoriating satire of the idle rich. Driven by a necrophilic passion for her dead husband, Vanda performs strange rituals of devotion and tortures her second husband for his inadequacies. The revelation of strange secrets about her first husband unfolds a dizzying game of shifting identities and loyalties. Oliveira's wickedly funny and disturbing satire of Portuguese class structure and the corruption of public mores was, ironically, his first film to receive state funding.