Vai e vem

The last chance to recommend a new film by Joao Cesar Monteiro. Because Vai e vem is the very last film by the idiosyncratic Portuguese master who died in February 2003. Monteiro is member of that rare race of film makers who are able to inculcate their own personality, their own taste and their own idiosyncrasies into every fibre of a film. Shameless, but with a 19th century respectability, he cheerfully shows erotic perversities. No one was better able than he to play the leading role, always an alter ego of himself, in his films. In a stately and sunny house in an old area of Lisbon, lives Joao Vuvu (Monteiro himself, of course), a widower whose only family is a son who is in jail for a double murder and armed robbery. Joao leads a withdrawn life and goes to the park by bus every day. Because his enormous collection of books becomes very dusty, he looks for a cleaning lady. The young women who respond to the advertisement do not look like the average cleaners, but the young ladies and the old man thoroughly enjoy themselves in their sexually loaded conversations. When the son is released, the great differences between father and son result in several strange events and the criminal is awoken in the old man.