A group of children live as a self-sufficient commune on an island cut off from the rest of the world in A Primeira Idade (which means “The First Age” in English), screening in the Bright Future section at Rotterdam. Each Solstice they banish the oldest among them into the surrounding forest, so there are never any adults in the colony. They believe that whoever leaps off the great rock on the other side of the wilderness into the sea will transform into a fish with eternal life, and they train with this moment in mind. This is the feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Alexander David, who has appeared as an actor in the work of João Pedro Rodrigues and others on the independent scene. There is a strong thread of pagan weirdness running through the film, though this remains on the level of unnerving atmosphere, and doesn’t descend into the all-out folk horror terrain of Rob Hardy’s The Wicker Man or Ari Aster’s Midsommar, films it inevitably brings to mind.
There is a vague, disconcerting blankness to this youthful tribe, who gather greens for meals and play games, but seem disconnected from any real purpose. It could hardly be otherwise. With no spoken language or historical memory, they’ve been unable to forge a coherent sense of identity. On the level of plot, this leaves us frustrated with little back-story to orient us. How they came to be here, and what exactly happened to their ancestors, is a mystery, though a monster, who guesses his own age to be around 500, and is prone to gazing out to sea from the clifftop in a reverie, obliges us by recounting in his whispery voice-over a few scraps of local legend. The fable is thin on facts, but sensorily beguiling, mixing its boldly coloured island scenes with ink drawings, and channeling enough of the distinctive magic of contemporary Portuguese cinema, with its love for fantasy and transgression, to hook us.
In eerie tableaux, the children stand or sit shoulder-to-shoulder, lined up like a school class or a pint-sized army. Their outfits are striking and strange: multi-coloured ensembles of headdresses, snakeskin boots and jewellery, that combine thrift-store cast-offs with ornamentation out of the wildest theatre (a dress with a keyhole and door handle jutting out of it takes the cake.) Their living space is decorated with the fairy lights and stage curtains of make-believe. Music sweeps operatically and or ominously pulses, while rain and the howls of creatures weave in and out of the evocative sound design, creating an otherworldly space alive with unnamed emotions and outside threat.
The “first age” of innocence is fragile in the colony, and ultimately no match for the revelations of cinema, sex, and death. On a forbidden adventure into the forest, an old television appears, incongruously, and transmits to them their first encounter with a man gasping his last. They become fascinated with the old movies it screens, with their coffin scenes, and the immortal creatures (Nosferatu among them) that try to cling onto and navigate life among the mortal. Frankenstein’s monster tosses a little girl into a lake, and they watch transfixed, in a nod to Victor Erice’s 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive, the Spanish classic that was a coded denunciation of Franco’s regime. Could it be political terror, or some other abomination that has landed them here, severed from their parents in adesperate effort to insulate them from the adult world’s horrors? It is hard for them to imagine anything beyond the island — but just as impossible for them to remain untouched by what they are missing. Maria, one of the teenagers, is pregnant, and as the time for her exile arrives, we recognise that separation is already a kind of dying.
Director, Writer, Production Designer: Alexander David
Producer: Pedro Fernandes Duarte
Editing: Tiago Siopa
Cinematography: Joao Gambino
Cast: Agata Pinho, Joana Ribeiro, Eder Ventura, Rodrigo Marujo
Sound Design: Miguel Martins
‘Music: Switch Dance
Production company: Primeira Idade (Portugal)
Sales: Primeira Idade (Portugal)
Venue: Rotterdam
In Portuguese
82 minutes
