What’s New About Love?: six films in one
by Vitor Pinto
What’s New About Love? is not only the first Portuguese feature film to be released this year, but it also has the added bonus of being directed by not one, but six different new directors: Mónica Santana Baptista, Hugo Martins, Tiago Nunes, Hugo Alves, Rui Santos y Patrícia Raposo. What’s New About Love? is six films for the price of one, not bad in these times of financial crisis. Each reveals the perspective of one of these six graduates from the Lisbon School of Theatre and Cinema.
What’s New About Love? is a singular experience by production company Rosa Filmes (also responsible for the works of João Pedro Rodrigues) that presents a simple concept, although rarely adopted in Portugal. Beyond a simple compilation of short films on the same theme like in some Italian short film collections from the 1960s, like The Witches or Boccace 70, What’s New About Love? is a succession of stories on the illusions and disillusions of love for six young adults. All characters are members of the same music band and their stories are linked through the images of their rehearsals. To each musician corresponds a story, to each story a director.
In the first of the six films, Tiago Nunes films João becoming closer to Inês, the group’s lead singer. The latter reappears in the last story, shot by Patricia Raposo, just as her relationship with João is about to crash. Between the stories about João and Inês are four others, definitely more complex and interesting. Mónica Santana Baptista tells the story of a theft in a library as a metaphor of falling in love. Hugo Martins explores with acerbity the themes of compromise and freedom. Hugo Alves shoots an unexpected gay pull at a squat party. Finally, Rui Santos, dares to address, with modesty, through flashbacks, and with a subjective camera, the always delicate suject of death.
The screenplay was conceived collectively, but no director saw what the others were shooting until editing started. The result is an experimental film whose strength comes from its authors’ stylistic variety, and from their will to talk about love, rejecting romantic comedies but still inhaling its caracteristic lightness. The freshness of its young actors, most of whom are recognisable from their work in television series, like Joana Santos, Ângelo Rodrigues, João Cajuda, and David Cabecinha, adds an extra point to this film that is also a sociological study of a certain type of young Portuguese: urban, university student, and middle class. The film doesn’t teach us anything new about love and the title is most certainly a rhetorical question, but it does manage to involve us in its love triangles and post-adolescent troubles that, in the end, prove to be the same as those of any other generation.
Distributor Zon Lusomundo will release What’s New About Love? in Portuguese cinemas days before Valentine’s Day, after the films does the rounds of IndieLisboa, São Paulo’s Mostra de Cine, and the International Film Festival of Luso-Brasileño in Santa-Maria da Feira, among others.
(Translated from Spanish)
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