To adapt any beloved author’s novel for the screen is notoriously difficult. But to be so bold as to base a film on the fragmentary and esoteric outpourings of Fernando Pessoa, famed for The Book of Disquiet and other works that made him a giant of twentieth-century literature, might just be approaching madness. Luckily, madness is a terrain that Portugal’s Edgar Pera, an idiosyncratic director known for his wild experimentation, feels at home in. Não Sou Nada — The Nothingness Club, screening in the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam, and termed by Pera a “cinenigma”, is a radical, outlandish and gorgeously realised noir-style mystery and trip into the mind of the Lisbon-born poet and philosopher, who wrote under a number of different personae (which he called “heteronyms”). Perhaps too bizarre and conceptual for wide release, this film will nevertheless have no trouble finding its audience, especially among fans of Pessoa charmed to see his strangeness done justice. Though there is never a boring minute, to audiences with no prior knowledge of Pessoa’s alter-egos, aphorisms and singular philosophies, the whole bonkers set-up will doubly confound.
The metallic clack of old-fashioned typewriters and dramatic piano chords soundtrack this world, an office of varnished wood and mirrors, where a fleet of men are all dressed alike in suits and fedora hats, with the poet’s signature glasses and moustache. We see by his nametag that the heteronym Ricardo Reis (Vitor Correia) is among them. This urbane army of workers sweat under tyrannical pressure from Pessoa (Miguel Borges) to finish the books they have been assigned to write. Pessoa himself sits behind a desk under a neon sign that reads “The Nothingness Club” and bathes the room in an alarming red glow. Super-impositions, reflections, and focus that blurs and sharpens intermittently emphasise split perspectives and self-containment. This is a beautifully rendered (and boldly campy) workplace, that seems to have no outside to it. The attached bar where these working minds go to smoke and drink, elegant as it is, offers no relief from the pains of getting the job done. These heteronyms share not only an originator, but anguished torment, dramatised as an old-school insane asylum of screams and straitjackets, where patients in striped pyjamas are subjected to shock therapy to quell their mental rebellion. We were warned by the poet to follow him with caution — and find that it’s a dangerous place where deaths are not infrequent. As one man is stabbed in the eye with a pencil, and another is burnt alive, the body count rises.
Inspired thought is equated with electric charge, and sensations deemed the only reality, in this deliciously over-the-top and maximalist universe of dream, riddle and terrorisation. It is not only the struggle to write that troubles the men, but the alluring presence of Ophelya (Victoria Guerra), a secretary (and sometime nurse) in a femme-fatale get-up (red lipstick, clicking heels, and perfectly sculpted hair), with an intense gaze that suggests danger. The gender relations are a macho throwback to another time, but as the unhinged obsessions of a delirious and solipsistic mind capable of loving only its own creations, it all makes a twisted sort of sense.
Can art be put into cinema? Adding a meta level to all this madness, the heteronym Alvaro de Campos (Albano Jeronimo) is working, in high conflict with Pessoa, on this very question. A backdrop of Portuguese cinema from the ‘30s and ‘40s adds yet another beguiling layer to the play of light, shadow and image. The only forceful signal from the outside world that blares in is fascism, as Mussolini’s recorded voice calls for nothing to be against the state and nothing outside the state. If poems create rather than emulate reality, as they do in this peculiar and unorthodox office, then under the authoritarianism of Pessoa’s era, the mind is the only hope for freedom — even if spending too much time with your own thoughts might just drive you over the edge.
Director: Edgar Pera
Producer: Rodrigo Areias
Writers: Edgar Pera, Luisa Costa Gomes
Editing: Claudio Vasques
Cinematography: Jorge Quintela
Cast: Miguel Borges, Victoria Guerra, Albano Gerónimo, Vítor Correia
Sound Design: Pedro Marinho, Pedro Góis
Production company: Bando a Parte (Portugal)
Sales: Bando a Parte (Portugal)
Venue: Rotterdam
In Portuguese and English
93 minutes
