Our Beloved Month of August (2008)

On paper, Our Beloved Month of August (dir. Miguel Gomes) sounds like a wonderful, wonderful film: improvisation, the Portugese countryside, drifting fictional tales. It might have been a bad day when I watched it, but I never felt myself moved by it; instead of enjoying the looseness and the relaxed mood of the film, I was - and this doesn't happen that often - bored. There were things I liked (some of the musical scenes, some of the quieter landscape explorations, some of the storytelling) and had the film focused less on the fictional story, I might have ended up with a more positive verdict. The inclusion of the film team in the story is all right; its quite fun watching anxious producers and the staff trying to explain what they are up to, reassuring everybody about the time table, creating diversions etc. And watching villagers tell coherent and not-so-coherent stories is entertaining as well, It's when the fictional elements take over the film that I'm starting to lose interest; the family drama that was unraveled seemed dull and forced.