The Cinematheque

“David Lynch could take lessons from the understated surrealism of this oddball Portuguese comedy … Much of the humour comes from the disjunction between the patiently recorded, outrageously banal gestures of the characters and the ravishing beauty with which they are filmed.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

After three magisterial works of myth and folk tale, which progressed from free fragmentation (Trails) to absolute coherence of space and time (Hovering Over the Water), João César Monteiro rewrote his own rules in order to make a film that still stands as one of the most acclaimed in all of Portuguese cinema. Monteiro, heretofore a cameo performer in his films, appears as João de Deus, a tenant in a Lisbon apartment building who acts as both a Chaplinesque voyeur suffering from bedbugs and other tramp-like indignities and a refined, vampiric figure like the one played by Erich von Stroheim in his Foolish Wives. João dryly dispenses proud maxims and sticks his finger in the eye of bourgeois morality, but his deadpan presence is often delicately poised to enable a variety of dramatic outcomes, whether melancholic tenderness or seriocomic madness.

In Portuguese with English subtitles

One of the Greatest Portuguese Films of All Time (#3)
filmSPOT Critics Poll (2020)

Recollections of the Yellow House will be preceded by a video introduction from filmmaker Miryam Charles (Cette maison).

“Monteiro [plays] João de Deus to perfection … He sidesteps psychodrama to produce something altogether cooler, more thought-provoking, and more perverse.”

Geoff Andrews, Time Out