A costa dos murmurios

Margarida Cardoso, making her feature début, has completed a beautiful film filled with veiled tension based on a novel by Lídia Jorge. The Murmuring Coast is set on the coast of a Portuguese colony in the 1960s – the country concerned remains unnamed but is unmistakably Mozambique. The film is about dying colonial ambitions, about hypocrisy, about the tired routine attitude to the violent course of events in the colonial era. Corpses wash up on the beach of this tropical paradise, with its beautiful and nostalgic 1960s sets; they are corpses of black people no one cares about… Everything is rotting and sad, and the light is bright but gritty. The young bride Evita (Batarda) arrives in the tropical coastal resort to marry the mathematics student Luis, who is doing his military service there. She soon finds out that the colonial civil war has changed her fiancé into a bossy, pale copy of his commander Forza Leal. When the men set off to fight, Luis doesn’t want Evita to leave her hotel room, but she sets out to look around the town. She sees the seamy side and meets journalists who tell her about the cruelty of the army. And she enjoys the company of the beautiful and humiliated wife of Forza Leal, Helena, nicknamed ‘Helen of Troy’, who tells her more about Luis than she wants to know. (GT)