OS VERDES ANOS / THE GREEN YEARS (1963)

From the late ‘50s thru the early ‘60s, various schools of New Wave Cinema sprung up all over Europe; differently named but impossible to miss in England, Germany, Italy, Poland and, of course, France.  Spain was in deep freeze as long as Generalissmo Franco held the reins (Spaghetti Westerns instead of Nueva Ola?), but Portugal’s small film community came a’knocking with this debut feature from 27-yr-old writer/director Paulo Rocha.  Technically very free, its story naturally focused on the new generation of post-war youth, here following a country lad who goes to work in the big city (Lisbon) and lives with his unattached uncle in a bad part of town.  (The middle-aged uncle is actually the more interesting character, a painter of artistic tiles for murals with a bohemian lifestyle.  But the times demanded youths.)  Slight, quiet, painfully shy, the thin-skinned boy more gangly Anthony Perkins than jangly James Dean, and, as an actor, frankly not quite registering in Rui Gomes’ blank portrayal.  Apprenticing with a shoemaker, he meets, courts, breaks up with and proposes to a pretty neighboring housemaid, their dates and unfolding relationship told thru velvety city walks and bad party scenes.  This is charmingly handled by Rocha, with graceful narrative ellipses rather than jump cuts feathered into the studio-free filming style, a revolutionary naturalism at the time.  But as the boy sinks in emotional quicksand (jealous of what he doesn’t understand/feeling patronized if anything is explained), Rocha pushes too hard for a No-Way-Out finish which Gomes, in his first significant role, can’t begin to pull off.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Ermanno Olmi shows what’s wrong here in his masterful IL POSTO/’61.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  An off-kilter scene with the uncle shows Gomes ‘acting out’ at a bar where his uncle takes him to meet friends and go girl watching.  And when a fight breaks out between them, an odd duck of an Englishman, closer in age to the uncle than to Gomes, steps in and winds up roaming the back streets of Lisbon with the boy.  Everything about this sequence shrieks homosexual pick up (see Fellini’s I VITTELONI/’53), but this ends with a pair of prostitutes for the two.  Would a gay pass have been censored at the time?