After his early break as an assistant to Manoel De Oliveira (as well as to Wim Wenders and Werner Schroeter), writer-director João Canijo has made a name for himself as a great Portuguese filmmaker in his own right. A regular at Cannes, Rotterdam (which he opened in 1988 with his feature debut Three Less Me) and Toronto, he’s also visited San Sebastián, where Blood of My Blood won the FIPRESCI Prize in 2011. That film also became Portugal’s Oscar submission in 2012, the second time for Canijo after 2004’s In the Darkness of Night, one of his collaborations with famed producer Paulo Branco.
In 2023, he is making his Berlinale debut with a diptych consisting of Living Bad and Bad Living: the former screens in international Competition, the latter in Encounters. A choice that was tied to how to best present the two works to the festival audience, as Berlin’s artistic director Carlo Chatrian told The Film Verdict: one film has a more cohesive structure, and is thus better suited for the main competition, while the other is episodic, consisting of three stories, and therefore found its home in the more formally daring Encounters strand. The two works are separate, and can be enjoyed on their own merits, but are nonetheless intertwined through their shared location of a family-run hotel on the northern shores of Portugal. Bad Living focuses on the women in charge of the venue, while Living Bad deals with three different families staying at the hotel, with the protagonists of one half of the diptych becoming background characters in the other.
The two films are also very different in conception: Bad Living is akin to Mike Leigh’s philosophy of filmmaking, whereby the screenplay was created over a long rehearsal period with the actresses, to capture the truth of a tragic tale of bitterness, as three generations of women are forced to stay under the same roof even though they can barely tolerate each other. Conversely, Living Bad borrows freely from three plays by one of Canijo’s favorite authors, the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The latter’s writings also create a bridge to another important influence, the Scandinavian maestro Ingmar Bergman (whose maxim “a film has to come from an idea that is present in every scene and in every shot” is central to the Portuguese auteur’s creative mindset).
Such an ambitious undertaking, which promises layers of introspection mirroring each other across festival sections, is already one of the main talking points of this 73rd Berlinale, the first full-scale edition since Chatrian’s debut in 2020. Fittingly, that year also had a cross-section diptych (albeit part of a much larger project) with two instalments of the monumental DAU film cycle. In that sense, Canijo’s contribution to the 2023 line-up signals a festival that knows exactly what it’s doing and is gearing up for a grand return to the usual proceedings.
