Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), a frizzy-haired Portuguese aid worker, thrives under pressure in public, but wilts in his personal life. Amidst his demanding but rewarding work for an NGO operating in the West African and Lusophone Commonwealth country Guinea-Bissau, something is gnawing at him, and it concerns his neurosis towards his complicated vocation, and especially his frustrated libido. Pedro Pinho’s three-and-a-half-hour epic I Only Rest in the Storm isn’t any better at providing answers on Sérgio’s behalf, or even purposeful catharsis, yet it’s an engaging window to observe his life and travails. Following up Pinho’s 2017 Directors’ Fortnight hit The Nothing Factory [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Pedro Pinho
scheda film], the new film has premiered in Un Certain Regard.

So, that running time. With his previous feature also hitting a cool 177 minutes, duration is obviously key to Pinho’s artistic vision, and I Only Rest in the Storm requires its sprawl for the range of disparate themes it explores and in order to burrow deep into characterisation (although you could say that one of its ostensible key characters, Guilherme – played by Jonathan Guilherme – is still underserved by the story’s trajectory). It’s a hypnotic, if demanding, sit at 211 minutes, but it would feel undernourished and unfinished if it were 45 minutes shorter. You need to ease into its flow in an experiential manner and set your body clock to the well-known cultural notion of “African time”. And almost to reward viewers for their unwavering concentration, Pinho “gifts” us an awesomely graphic and naturally played sex scene around two-thirds of the way in.

Like in a less-pressurised variation on Toni Erdmann [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
Q&A: Maren Ade
scheda film], Sérgio has to go from place to place in the country, supervising the installation of clean-water services and civil engineering projects, and DoP Ivo Lopes Araújo’s camera perches on his shoulder like a good observational documentarian so that we can contemplate this ourselves. Other viewers may disagree, but Pinho shows this relationship of aid and post-colonial diplomacy clearly working, despite the odd operational growing pains. But of course, his screenplay strongly interrogates notions of white saviourism, and how this post-independence relationship is rather a neo-colonial pact between a master and its former subject.   

If his professional responsibilities function well in a macro sense, Sérgio rightly knows there’s something morally questionable about what he’s pursuing, and being a human being with needs, he seeks an outlet in socialising and sex. His expat existence is counterposed with that of his neighbour Diára (the excellent Cleo Diára) and her fashionable circle of acquaintances, where she can subsist with some second-generation wealth and independence (compared to her mother in her old township, seen in a vivid late-film sequence) and also be under threat from the growing capitalist machinations of urban Guinea-Bissau. Sérgio romantically pursues her, as well as assorted men, and a point is made about his sexual coveting of various Bissau-Guineans, corresponding to the aid infrastructure he implements and imposes on them.

Sérgio feels like a vague analogue for Pinho’s position in all of this, looking in from the outside, and wondering if he belongs or is overstepping various boundaries. This dynamic makes I Only Rest in the Storm feel slightly self-conscious, doubling back and circling its own themes, but there’s also beauty in its commitment to hesitance and ambivalence.

I Only Rest in the Storm is a production by Portugal, France, Brazil and Romania, staged by Uma Pedra no Sapato, Terratreme Filmes, Still Moving, Bubbles Project and deFilm. Its world sales are overseen by Paradise City Sales.