Our Beloved Month Of August

My inclination to compare Gomes to Weerasethakul is even stronger here than in Tabu. This feels like nothing so much as a (somewhat) better-realized Mysterious Objects at Noon, or to be fair actually as close anything has come to a more festival-ready, less "transgressive" variation on Gummo's experimental, highly impressionistic blurring of staged "fiction" and documentary "realism". At the same time it also seems to imitate a pseudo-Herzogian anti-aesthetic in (in my opinion) unfortunate ways.

Beginning with documentary footage of villagers and music festivals in the Portuguese mountains, the film slowly morphs into a fictional melodrama of family strife and forbidden love. This ambitious, and largely successful, film grows increasingly complex during its run time, leaving it unclear just how much and at which times the cast are playing themselves. Added bits of the film crew and director discussing the project add layers of levity and intrigue to the entire film.

A difficult film to classify, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, a freewheeling documentary about the making of a movie that, somewhere along the line, develops into an actual wispy but likeable narrative before becoming meta once more by the end. Not everything sticks and it’s overlong, but it does have a good amount of charm, and some of the (many) musical numbers are terrific.

Star Rating: ★★★★★

"what a shitty country"

I do appreciate the effort. It's naturalistic, kind of mulls even having a narrative and recurring characters, features these deconstructionist moments where it seems to discuss its own making, and gives a haphazard, almost random look at its locale. It does all of this with the sincerity and humility of a filmmaker wanting to try doing things differently. Still, by the time Gomes starts to play things straight, my patience was exhausted. It's too long and too boring.

An enigmatic and emotionally authentic experiment of filmmaking, that starts as this strange documentary about the lives of this people living in the mountains -- we see common people and filmmakers on screen, planning what will be a film to be shot in this area -- and evolves into a coming of age tale of impossible, forbidden love, with a marvelous songbook enriching the narrative. August is an impressive essay on memory -- or how memory is at the heart of great fiction.

Fantastic job Portugal !!!

80

Understated, naturalistic, and somber. Each character occupies a unique emotional niche, and the setting feels pleasantly remote and pastoral. It's too long, though, and at times the extended performances of the band and frequent ventures into minutiae left the impression that I was watching a rough cut of the film.