21/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Chronicling the process of grief and soul-searching, alas Susana Nobre’s film can never truly unleash its full potential

Portuguese director Susana Nobre returns to the 73^rd Berlinale with her newest feature, which has premiered in the Forum section. Cidade Rabat [+see also:
trailer
film profile] deals with the topics of grief and finding a purpose in a life that sometimes just seems to pass us by. She takes her protagonist, Helena (Raquel Castro), on a journey from losing her mother in the opening minutes of the film to rock bottom, seemingly losing everything else, too – car, job, direction. There may be something liberating in re-examining life at 40, diving into new challenges. Yet the laconic style of the movie makes it a hard watch, rather than infecting us with the joy of rediscovering life.

Without following a strict narrative, Nobre lets Helena wander the streets of her hometown, engage with her young daughter (who is going through the difficult teenage phase of alternately cherishing and hating her parents) and deal with issues in her job as a movie production assistant. In between, she and her sister have to take care of her mother’s apartment, estate and funeral. Her home, so nice and cosy, now has to be emptied. Cidade Rabat was the street on which Helena’s mother lived, and on which she grew up. Her voice-over takes a prolonged moment before the opening credits to recount those childhood memories, mentioning a friend long since dead and the quirky neighbours behind each door. It is peculiar that neither Cidade Rabat nor this huge amount of exposition ever truly plays a role again.

The often wooden dialogue, paired with these excessive amounts of information, is a tiring narrative choice that keeps on popping up throughout the story. Viewers have to sit through extended monologues about what bureaucratic steps one has to take to declare a person dead, medical assessments of how to remove eczema from a buttock, or how to keep the books in film production. Of course, there is a certain quality to these moments: the notion of how grief is overshadowed by red tape, and the cool atmosphere of a doctor’s office ring only too true. But Nobre mostly focuses her gaze on the poorer, run-down streets. One could go as far as to draw a bleak parallel between the chaos in the streets and Helena’s life, but that is most likely not what is at play here.

Castro manages to play effectively with the minimal dialogue and inner turmoil that one gets to see in her character. Her constant, neutral gaze on the world and her occasional outbursts at the scenes unfolding in front of her feel relatable. Yet there is a certain nihilism to her persona – one that makes watching her go about her day more of a chore than a cinematic experience. When she does push the envelope by dancing at parties or drink-driving, the film catches fire with its subtle but slick portrayal of these technically mundane events. Even her sentencing to community service in exchange for a lower fine has its more trenchant moments. She may know how to film the events of the sports club she signs up for, or how to improve the bookkeeping, but the fact that she also has to clean the dishes is something that seems to escape her.

When the film finally comes full circle and brings her back to the flat in Cidade Rabat, there has been little gained in terms of its storytelling or solving the enigma of who Helena is and what she wants. Maybe that is Nobre’s intention. But it makes the movie way less engaging than it could have been otherwise.

Cidade Rabat was produced by Portugal’s Terratreme Filmes and France’s KinoElektron.