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SURREALIST ROMANCE

Today's film is the Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira’s

Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura / Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (2009)

It takes awhile to figure out what is going on here.

There are clues.

At first I wondered if I was getting it. A clock without hands that strikes sort of inappropriately. Time is endless?

A guy who talks to a stranger on a train and tells a story but they never look at one another. The countryside changes character back and forth.

The man falls in love at first sight. More with a fan than the blonde.

Cinematic clichés abound.

There are portraits of ancestors in almost every scene of the story told by the man.

Everything happens and nothing happens.

Oliveira is 100 when he makes this film. What is he telling us? Time does not matter. Things do not matter. We live in a world of events that are clichés. They repeat themselves.

It is only an hour long so if you do not like it you won't have to suffer much. I didn't suffer but did get sleepy in the middle, then perked up in the end and actually laughed at spots.

I think, actually, that this is an old man's tale to illustrate that we should not take life too seriously.

Of course, if you are a century old, this perspective is easy to attain and maintain. I am not quite there yet.

I will give it a 3 out of Netflix5. It is a NYTimes Critic's Pick.

Labels: films