Manoel de Oliveira's Benilde or the Virgin Mother is a staid, stately, deadpan, dreary examination of bourgeois faith and lunacy. The entire film takes place in two or three rooms in a single house belonging to a well-to-do Portuguese family in the early Twentieth century. The eponymous Benilde is a young woman raised her whole life in seclusion who claims to have had a vision from God. Shortly thereafter a doctor discovers she's pregnant. Benilde insists it's a child from God; her family thinks it was the local lunatic who may have raped her during one of her frequent sleepwalking episodes. The entire film basically watches these characters slowly, meticulously explore what's happened and what will happen if the child is truly divine...or more likely if it's just a fatherless bastard. There are many dry philosophical and theological debates and many Bergman-esque moments of characters delivering entire monologues in unbroken takes while staring right at the camera. The effect is tedious, but deliberately so. I'll admit this film doesn't match up with my usual tastes, but it's an intriguing piece of aesthetic filmmaking, particularly in how de Oliveira emphasizes offscreen audio and dialogue so much--entire conversations between 2-4 people will take place as the camera fixes on only one of them; we hear the lunatic's howling but never actually see him. It's bizarrely disorienting and effective.
7/10
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