The Cinematheque

“The spirit of Fellini looms over this ribald urban folktale, but its mercurial cinematic inspiration is Monteiro’s own … [An] ode to mysterious possibility.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

João César Monteiro’s tour through the resonant powers of fairytales, even in fragmented or revised form, landed at the shores of contemporary Lisbon nightlife in The Last Dive, a film of immediate, freewheeling pain and pleasure, as well as mirage-like formal maneuvers coded with the early experimentation of silent cinema. Night has fallen upon Samuel, suicidal at the end of a pier. As a sympathetic act, the middle-aged philanderer Eloi distracts him with a many-times-travelled itinerary of the city’s offering—a home, a club, a brothel, a cafe—to test the certainty of his despair. Fabienne Babe (Cathy in Rivette’s Wuthering Heights) plays Eloi’s daughter; like in Hans Christian Andersen’s tragically shaded The Little Mermaid she cannot speak, and for good or ill she attracts Samuel’s interest. Monteiro makes a labyrinth out of this straightforward set-up, creating sound-image disjunctions and documenting the independence of the city’s routines beyond any narrative requirements.

In Portuguese and French with English subtitles

“An all-or-nothing film … Never has Lisbon been so nocturnal, so livid, so secret.”

João Bénard da Costa, Foco - Revista de Cinema