Imagine the intensity of an Ingmar Bergman film without the psychological acuity, combined with the emotional punishment of a Lars von Trier picture minus the intellectual rigor, and you’ll land somewhere in the neighborhood of João Canijo’s Bad Living. The first of two connected films the director is premiering at the Berlinale, this Competition slog drags audiences through a deeply and unrelentingly unpleasant purgatorial portrait of matriarchal malfunction.
Set in a remote hotel in Portugal, where faded memories of better days outnumber the guests, four women from different generations of the same family keep the unprofitable accommodation running. The surprise arrival of Salomé (Madalena Almeida) tips the already precarious balance between the women in a mausoleum-like atmosphere. Estranged from her mother Piedade (Anabela Moreira) since she was as 12, the young woman has returned at the behest of Sara (Rita Blanco), her grandmother, following the recent death of her father whom she lived with. It’s this triangle around which the story rotates as Salomé confronts and questions Piedade for the reason behind years of neglectful, cruel, and absent mothering. This creates a domino effect as Piedade questions her own mother about her heartless upbringing and soon a vicious, unbreakable circle of poisonous resentments are unleashed between the trio, with recriminations and accusations flung down the hotel’s hallways.
Working from a screenplay Canijo developed across two years of discussion and rehearsals with his actresses, the result nonetheless feels laboriously mannered. The director endeavors to study the “anxiety of motherhood” in order to unmask the lie at the heart of the notion of unconditional love, but it’s a concept that few would argue comes without conditions. Bad Living often feels like a drama in service of a flawed thesis, rather than a film in search of the truth of its characters and story. Much of what happens, down its predictably grim finale, plays out like a foregone conclusion, with no sense of revelation, that all families are overflowing, broken receptacles of emotional acid that spills from parent to child in a lineage that can never be mended.
Curiously, what doesn’t occur to Canijo in what is clearly a deeply personal film, is the dynamic nature of relationships between parents and children in both affection and conflict, that change and evolve over time. The filmmaker perhaps is able to sidestep this impracticality to his narrative by setting Bad Living largely over the course of a single day. But it feels like a cheat, a manipulation that only better serves the conclusions he doesn’t want to honestly test.
Even if the air is thick with feel bad vibes, at the very least, Bad Living is beautiful to look at. Cinematographer Leonor Teles composes the picture through gorgeous long shots and carefully spacious frames that allow the actresses to fill them with the burdens and betrayals their characters can no longer shoulder. The film’s serene photography amplifies the discord within the walls of the hotel, allowing the audience to be observers or voyeurs to the familial decay.
The idea that parents live on through their children is more of a curse than comfort in the eyes of Canijo. It’s a point he despairingly and repeatedly drives home in Bad Living, and further explores and excavates in the film’s companion, Living Bad, that focuses on the guests of the hotel. Briefly glimpsed in this picture, they are also deeply unhappy, brimming with an array unresolved grievances they’ve carried with them on vacation. And just like their hosts, the pain they carry must be forever endured.
Director: João Canijo
Screenplay: João Canijo
Cast: Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, Vera Barreto
Producers: Pedro Borges
Cinematography: Leonor Teles
Production design: Nádia Henriques
Costume design: Silvia Siopa
Editing: João Braz
Sound: Tiago Raposinho
Production companies: Midas Filmes (Portugal)
World sales: Portugal Film
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In Portuguese
127 minutes