In Living Bad, the second film of his Berlinale bummer double feature, João Canijo continues his probe of mothers behaving badly, and the toxic drip of their misguided affection. This time around, the guests of the hotel run by the generation of women featured in Bad Living take center stage in a picture that’s less intense than its predecessor, but just as miserable. With nothing new to venture about the baton pass of emotional abuse within families it’s hard to understand why Canijo needed two films to state what he has already emphatically said in one.
Based on the plays of August Strindberg, the screenplay is sliced into three chapters. The first, Playing With Fire, follows Camila (Filipa Areosa), an Instagram influencer with low self-esteem who may or may not be cheating on her boyfriend Jamie (Nuno Lopes) with his best friend. Jamie’s paranoia of a possible affair is fuelled by his mother, whose phone calls he’ll pick up mid-coitus to hear her speculations of possible impropriety based on Camila’s social media feed. In The Pelican, the brittle Graça (Lia Carvalho) is unaware that her serpentine mother Elisa (Leonor Silveira) is carrying on an affair with her husband Alexandre (Rafael Morais). Lastly, Motherlove finds — you guessed it — a mother, Judite (Beatriz Batarda), actively working to destroy the relationship between her daughter Júlia (Leonor Vasconcelos) and her girlfriend Alice (Carolina Amaral).
If Bad Living at least provided some visual pleasure thanks to the careful cinematography by Leonor Teles, who worked on both films, this time around the photography is less considered. Living Bad, both in tone and aesthetic, is more conventional, as if these stories were being played out in a telenovela. There is certainly something a little more pulpy about the narratives, as the betrayals and double-crosses feel more attuned to an airport paperback than a film based on the richly dramatic work of a famed playwright.
More concerning is that in sitting though the second feature that Canijo conjured based centered on the corrupted concept of unconditional love, one begins to wonder if the filmmaker problematically believes this something unique to women. Fathers have been similarly distant and destructive to their sons, who in turn have done the same to their children. But in this film, even when Jamie and Alexandre are making harmful choices, somewhere in the background is a woman manipulating their decisions. It underscores that, at the very least, across Bad Living and Living Bad, Canijo’s exploration of trauma is less complex than it presents on paper, refusing to acknowledge the bigger, more knotty truth that families aren’t single-celled entities but sophisticated, ever changing organisms.
Just as the guests flitted across the background of Bad Living, in Living Bad the family in free fall are the wallpaper to this drama. After nearly four hours, the hotel that has served the family and its guests for years becomes a character itself, its hallways, swimming pool, and balconies bearing witness and serving as stages for the sordid stories that unfold. But even more, it seems to become an entity like the Overlook from The Shining, warping whoever checks in into the worst version of themselves, inflicting those around them with the venom of self-serving intentions with the consequences forever frozen in time.
Director: João Canijo
Screenplay: João Canijo
Cast: Nuno Lopes, Filipa Areosa, Leonor Silveira, Rafael Morais, Lia Carvalho, Beatriz Batarda, Carolina Amaral, Leonor Vasconcelos
Producers: Pedro Borges
Cinematography: Leonor Teles
Production design: Nadia Henriques
Costume design: Silvia Siopa
Editing: João Braz
Sound: Tiago Raposinho
Production companies: Midas Filmes (Portugal)
World sales: Portugal Film
Venue: Berlinale (Encounters)
In Portuguese
125 minutes
