A distraught father, Mario (Nuno Lopes), establishes for himself a Sisyphean task wherein every day he meticulously repeats all the mundane activities he did the day his 3-year-old daughter, Alice, went missing. He is guided by the notion that Alice would somehow gravitate towards those places where they spent their last moments together, just like a magnet. He ensures that if she ever does come back, he wouldn't miss it.
Though it is a rationale that seems a bit far-fetched and too much to expect from someone barely a pre-schooler, the people around Mario sees this and others even dare to point out its futility, all of which he just nonchalantly shrugs off. Even his wife, Luisa (Beatriz Batarda), an inconsolable nervous wreck and seen most of the time slumped on their bed, still has some lucidity to question the unusual methods of his search.
Mario's unyielding spirit is the focus of this film, a well-rounded performance from Lopes, a grieving figure seen most of the time handing out missing-child pamphlets of his daughter to motorists and passersby. Then his self-imposed ritual has him visiting different places, apartment flats, shops and building rooftops to collect the cassette tapes of the surveillance video cameras that he has been permitted to install. He then scours those numerous tapes simultaneously at the end of the day to search for any signs of Alice, all with varying degrees of success. Success, in his case, is him being able to spot anyone remotely similar to a small kid wearing the same blue coat that Alice wore the day she disappeared, those images he then captures and prints and painstakingly document. Such are the tasks which he has to do again the next day and so forth. Some might call that just downright stubborn, others an unwavering sense of hope, which is the thing that drives the narrative of the film. Not even the obsolescence of the equipment seen used by the protagonist robs it of its effectiveness in conveying allusions. Seeing some blurred low-resolution image of a kid he suspects might be his daughter goads him to continue on with his routine, because if faith is indeed capable of moving mountains, perhaps it could pick up a giant boulder and make it disappear.
Marco Martins brilliantly rendered, in equal parts, the sullen and the sumptuous cityscape of downtown Lisbon. All praises for infusing that imagery with the playful motifs from
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the somber musical score by
Bernardo Sassetti. These elements contribute in eloquently evoking the melancholy of modern-day urban living. An outstanding debut film, if not an unforgettable depiction of someone's gloom.
Another of Martins and Lopes' later collaboration, an examination of the impact of the 2010-2014 Portuguese financial crisis on the lives of ordinary people is the drama
São Jorge (2016), which somehow is in the same vein as this film, also inspired by real events as stated in the film's end credits, providing a cinematic snapshot of what issues a family goes through when faced with such a devastating loss that hasn't any form of closure.
Nothing can amplify the tragedy for the viewer even more than what follows that scene in police station after Mario and Luisa finally decides to report the disappearance and learns about the limits of what that office could provide in their search for Alice.
--A-plus--
