Since his first film in 2000, the mesmerising O Fantasma, Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues has continually cast his gaze over the ever-changing landscape of Lisbon, its physical transformations and its well of mysteries. Co-directed with his longtime partner and artistic collaborator João Rui Guerra da Mata, this evocative documentary views the city through the lens of both autobiographical and cinematic nostalgia.
The film’s starting point is a personal one. Having inherited his grandparents’ flat, Rodrigues is intrigued by the fact that the window of this complex looks over the location of Paulo Rocha’s The Green Years, a 1963 cult classic that spearheaded Novo Cinema, the Portuguese new wave. Antonioniesque in its cinematography and plot, Rocha’s film charted a doomed working-class romance, shot in a rapidly urbanising Lisbon hemmed in by new developments and the nouveaux riche.
Retracing almost frame by frame the locations seen in The Green Years, Rodrigues and da Mata’s film captures a Covid-era Lisbon that is strangely emptied of people. Signs of gentrification emerge, yet moments of queer intimacy and movie magic also abound. Now in her 80s, Isabel Ruth, the star of Rocha’s film, occasionally glides across the screen with her elegant gait, her presence culminating in a literally traffic-stopping musical sequence that bookends the film.
An affectionate ode to a landmark work of Portuguese cinema, this might appear to be too niche for audiences not familiar with the source, but in fact it nicely illustrates the themes that recur throughout Rodrigues’s work: the intermingling of desire, fantasy and everyday life. Though enjoyable on its own terms as a psychogeographical drift through Lisbon, Where Is This Street? proves most potent after a viewing of Rocha’s masterpiece, which is screening at the same venue.
• Where Is This Street? Or With No Before and After is released on 13 July at the ICA, London.
