In one of the loveliest sequences in "The Tsugua Diaries," a sly, summery delight from Portugal, two men and a woman raise a series of wooden beams. As they work together — patiently, intuitively, almost wordlessly — the structure they're building gradually takes shape, and so, piece by piece, does this wondrously playful and mysterious movie. At one point midscene, the woman cautiously turns her head away from one of the men, who has a bandana wrapped around his face. You'll recognize the gesture; maybe you've done it yourself over the last few years, one of countless little coping measures during a time of infrequent togetherness and prolonged isolation.
Directed by the Lisbon-based filmmakers Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes (who co-wrote the script with Mariana Ricardo), "The Tsugua Diaries" is a pandemic-lockdown movie about a pandemic-lockdown movie. It was shot on a Portuguese farm between August and September 2020, and it tells the story of a film production operating under the same low-budget, protocol-heavy circumstances. The woman, Crista Alfaiate, and the men, Carloto Cotta and João Nunes Monteiro, are actors playing actors. The farm is an open-air set, as well as a set-within-a-set. As we watch these three build a butterfly house, splash around in a pool and dance to the infectious beat of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons' "The Night," you may wonder: Are we seeing the movie they're making, or their behind-the-scenes preparations for said movie? Is this art, life or a sun-kissed patchwork of both?
The movie — as opposed to the movie-within-a-movie — is structured in a way that complicates rather than answers these questions. "Tsugua" is simply "August" spelled backward, and "The Tsugua Diaries" itself unspools in reverse; it begins on Day 22 and ends on Day 1, and each scene is motivated and explained, more or less, by the one that comes after it (which is to say, before it). Imagine an achronological remake of François Truffaut's 1973 classic, "Day for Night," in which a character famously likens the filmmaking process to "a stagecoach ride in the Old West. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive."
