Pouco mais de um mês
2013 · 23m · Brazil
Directed by André Novais Oliveira
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After barely a month together, André and Élida wake in her apartment and, over breakfast and the wait for a bus, tentatively negotiate the fragile beginnings of their love.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A 23-minute film about two people eating breakfast sounds like the opposite of subversive, but Oliveira's refusal to manufacture drama or even a proper plot twist becomes its own kind of provocation—the radical act of letting tenderness exist without narrative scaffolding.
Novais Oliveira positions this intimate chamber piece within a lineage of slow cinema and the quotidian realism of contemporary Portuguese cinema, executing the formal restraint with such precision that the film's emotional weight emerges entirely through compositional choice and the measured pacing of mundane ritual.
The film hinges on a single recurring sound decision—the ambient texture of the apartment, the bus rumbling outside—that transforms what could be static observation into a spatial and emotional landscape; it's how Oliveira uses negative space and ambient design to do the work of plot.
Reviews
Le ton employé est si juste et si empli de pudeur qu'on se prend à être réellement touché par ces deux êtres qui s'apprivoisent assez difficilement. André Novais Oliveira a bel et bien réussi à mettre en images ce moment unique et si délicat à raconter qu'est le début des relations amoureuses.