Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl [53 points / 5 votes]
"In the introduction to the novella "The Yellow Sofa," a letter by author Eca De Quieros is excerpted where he argues for a "collection of short novels...which would be a reflection of contemporary life in Portugal." He added, "the attraction of these tales is that there are no digressions, no rhetoric, no philosophizing: everything is interesting and dramatic, and quickly narrated." For the most part, Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, an adaptation of Eca De Quieros' "Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura", follows these suggestions: its brevity (60 minutes), the lack of digressions (cinematic, thematic, dramatic), and a particular sense of the present. With that, Eccentricities is something of a modernist throwback, with its moral code footed in the 19th century while striking directly at them with its 20th and 21st century views on capitalism (this is one of the great films about the current global recession), gender (the female passenger on the train, whose eyes are below frame level, gazing at us), and art (a visual palate which owes as much to de Oliveira's silent films as it does to Modrian or Paul Strand).
Eccentricities is, remarkably, de Oliveira's lightest film in years, while being as political as A Talking Picture and having similar touches of magical realism that made The Strange Case of Angelica slightly leaden. The doomed love of Macario (the perfectly Bressonian Ricardo Trepa) and Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein) is seen through flashbacks that are strikingly adolescent: exchanged glances substituting the kind of rapture we've grown accustomed to seeing in movies, which need to be approved by both of their families and classes. When the film concludes that Luisa is something of a thieving femme fatale, Marcario's simple reaction is demanding that Luisa "Go away," with the burdens of love not in sight or even existent. And, even with the burdens of literary history framing an otherwise simple tale that takes place in the present, it's as of de Oliveira prefers the curiosity and discrepancy about the two periods to be rooted in humor and distance.
In a remarkable career capped by his surrealist masterpiece Doomed Love, de Oliveira is quickly making new work (10 features in the last decade, including one not yet released), and changing formal techniques: the time between the astonishing Oporto of My Childhood and The Strange Case of Angelica is a mere 9 years. Eccentricities is one of de Oliveira's best late films and, after reading Eca de Quieros' short story, one of the most lovely and curious adaptations I know. Pure pleasure." - Michael Lieberman
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