19/11/2024 - The Portuguese director chatted with us about his film, which broaches post-natal depression and coming out

(© Festival del cinema europeo di Lecce)

A distant brother and sister reunite and join forces to face their demons (in her case, post-natal depression, and in his, accepting his bisexuality) in Clear Nights [+see also:
interview: Paulo Filipe Monteiro
film profile] by Portuguese director Paulo Filipe Monteiro, which was presented in competition in a world premiere unspooling within the 25th Lecce European Film Festival. We sat down with the director in Lecce to talk about his movie.

Cineuropa: What drove you, as a man, to broach the topic of post-natal depression?
Paulo Filipe Monteiro: For years, I’d wanted to write a film about this paradox: a woman has a child, it should be the happiest day of her life, but when the child is born, she sinks into depression. I’ve always thought it would make a good subject for a film. It’s about the woman as well as her partner. I did a lot of research, I read books, but the most important influence was a Portuguese nurse who started a blog telling her own personal story, and other women who had been through the same thing could subsequently identify with one another; they no longer felt alone. The blog gathered together countless testimonials from modern-day Portuguese women who spoke about the more concrete side of things, in terms of scientific articles and statistics: the odour they can smell on themselves, their suffering when they hear their baby crying, etc. That’s how I started to get inside of that world. Baby blues affect 80% of women, and some of them sink into deep depression, even going so far as to consider killing their baby: they don’t feel capable of being mothers.

Where did you get the idea for combining this subject-matter, which is already huge in and of itself, with another significant theme: accepting our sexual orientation?
It was at a time when I was struggling to write the film.  I was at the Berlin Film Festival, and I started to think about another character. To begin with, it was a minor character, then I started to develop it and it took on a life of its own, independent from the protagonist. Further down the line, they became brother and sister who were distant, but, in a moment of shared crisis, they grew closer to one another. That’s how the family theme came into it too: both of them have a problem with their mother. From that point onwards, everything started to fall into place. They’re two different situations but both of them involve confusion.

The film alternates between moments of depression and moments of sensuality. How did you develop this approach?
The film revolves around depression, but it’s not a depressing film: it looks depression straight in the eye and then shows you you can get through it. So the characters get back to living their lives, to having sexual relationships, etc. The logline I chose for the film was: “The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an illusion: the tunnel is”. Is the baby ok, Nuno asks his wife Lidia, because she’s distressed; the light is there but, for her, it’s all tunnel. When these clouds eventually dissipate, she moves towards the light. It’s the same thing with Lauro: he thinks he’ll never have the courage to admit his sexual orientation, but then he tells his son and his mother, and everything is ok. I like characters who move towards the light.

A lot of your characters’ self-expression comes through their bodies and through dance. What was the idea behind this?
Dance had an even greater presence in the early days of this project. I wanted to make a film where dialogue came through the body as well as through words. I’m passionate about dance; I was fortunate enough to work with Pina Bausch. For three years, I studied each and every dance movie and I made a short film which also leaned in that direction. For this project, I chose actors who moved really well. The actor who plays Lauro is a brilliant dancer, and even the actress who plays the grandmother was previously a dancer under Maurice Béjart. There was a choreographer on set every day, but we didn’t have time to pin down any real form of body language. There are dance scenes in the film because one of the characters is a dancer, and there are a few little things which appear in other scenes, like when the brother is talking with his sister, and he picks her up while he’s still speaking. We did what we could, and I’d like to continue along this road of incorporating movement into storytelling. That’s what my next production will focus on.

You depict a modern and unusual version of Lisbon in your film.
It annoys me that we always see the same version of Lisbon in films, the same streets. Because it’s changed so much: we have fantastic architects, incredible buildings which we haven’t yet seen in films. It’s a different kind of Lisbon that you see in this film. Lots of scenes were shot in the Park of Nations, where the World Fair was held in ‘98. I also chose a few other buildings here and there, because I like contemporary architecture. I also love Michelangelo Antonioni; he liked to shoot in different, special and more modern places too. It’s no coincidence that the actress I used as a model for playing Lidia was Monica Vitti.

Last but not least, could you tell us a little about your use of sound? I’m thinking of the baby’s constant crying…
The constant sound of a baby crying is one of the causes of depression, that really loud noise. So many women have attested to this. For me, cinema is all about images and sound. We tend to say: “Did you see that film?”, but we could also ask: “Did you hear it?”.

(Translated from Italian)