05/07/2024 - The talented and impenetrable Portuguese filmmaker André Gil Mata journeys through time to explore the space of a home and two women’s lives

"If the moon invariably shows the same side to Earth during its revolution, it means that in that same period of time, it turns once on its axis." A fascinating lesson in radical cinema and an unhurried deep-dive into the hidden and fragmented side of female emotions is at the heart of The Flame of a Candle, a huis-clos by Portuguese director André Gil Mata (who was particularly well-received in the 2018 Berlinale Forum thanks to The Tree [+see also:
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The former pupil of Hungarian master Béla Tarr shows no fear and knows exactly which magic ingredients to use in order to create shots immersed "in deepest night, tempered only by the pale light falling from the stars." It’s a paradoxical kind of obscurity, echoing the lives of Alzira and Beatriz, two women who have shared the small dominion of a comfortable house in the outskirts of Porto for almost 60 years, like two birds in a cage: one of them since childhood, having never left this residence where she now plays the role of housewife, and the other as a live-in governess and cook.

"I’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage". We have to wait over 30 minutes for these very first words to be uttered in this film which first introduces us to its main protagonists in 14 elliptical sequences: there’s the very elderly Alzira (Eva Ras), and Beatriz (Márcia Breia), who slowly wind their way through the different rooms in the house without exchanging a word; husband Augusto (Dinis Gomes), who only clambers out of his armchair where he sits to read his newspaper, O Comércio do Porto, in order to eat after being served by his wife before he heads out to work; beautiful teen Alzira (Luísa Guerra), who languishes at her piano (anxiously watched by her mother and teacher) and dabbles at watercolours, copying postcards from Rio de Janeiro where her father (we later learn) is now living; elderly Alzira as a very solitary child (Olívia Silva) or as a forty-year-old (Gina Macedo); Beatriz when she was young (Gisela Matoz), and other family characters making fleeting appearances. The film is a temporal spiderweb from which the director extracts a sophisticated soup of tangled threads, leaving the viewer to untangle and make sense of the jumble, and to guess at (or imagine) why there’s such an intense air of heaviness in this human micro-space: "that’s life, no-one can do anything about it".

Unfolding around a single sequence which is repeated four times, travelling from the neighbouring church bell to slip all the way into the entrance hall of the house through the garden which varies according to the seasons, The Flame of the Candle is a work which is as masterly (expertly composed shots, caressing camera movements, an incredibly refined use of off-camera techniques and wonderful work courtesy of director of photography Frederico Lobo) as it is cryptic and suggestive (a deadly atmosphere, sibylline symbols, an almost entirely unstructured narrative style). To those willing to accept his very peculiar style and tempo, André Gil Mata offers a first-rate cinematographic experience. As the film suggests to "well-disposed but somewhat reluctant minds": "go into your dining room and walk around the table while keeping your eyes fixed on its centre. When your tour of the table is complete, you will have turned on your own axis, because your eye will have successively travelled over every point in the room. Well, the room is the sky, the table is the Earth and you are the moon!"

The Flame of the Candle is produced by Portuguese firm Rua Escura together with French outfit So-cle.

(Translated from French)