Angels might fear to tread on territory such as this — Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights” has previously formed the inspiration for films from Luschino Visconti, Robert Bresson, and James Gray, among others. But then prolific Brazilian shorts director Leonardo Mouramateus is either no angel, or a particularly fearless one, because his feature debut “Antonio One Two Three” with gleeful mischief, plunges both hands elbow-deep into Dostoevsky’s tale of triangular, unrequited love, and teases and stretches and taffy-pulls it into something new.
Where previous takes have felt somber, imbued with the melancholy of missed connection, and the wastage of lives imagined in an absent lover’s arms, Mouramateus’ script exudes the bouncy exuberance of youth and dares to add a sweet little dash of hope to the mix. The result is close in tone to one of the whimsical, slippery recent entries from Hong Sang-soo, as though Mouramateus has stumbled into a heavy curtained room infected with traditional Russian gloom, and, turning to us with a quick wink, thrown open a window to the sunlight and the lemon trees outside.
We’re in modern-day Lisbon, which is washed to a linen freshness by the gently blanched grade on cinematographer Aline Belfort’s hip, handheld Academy-ratio images. Antonio (an engaging Mauro Soares) comes home to a disapproving father who has received an anonymous letter informing him, correctly, that his son has dropped out of college. This opening scene already has an air of theatrical unreality, like an improv sketch. Dad peels an orange deliberately while forcing Antonio to read the letter aloud. But then Antonio leaps up suddenly and runs off with his father in hot pursuit, and what clues us into the tone of the whole endeavor is the tiny grin he flashes just before he does so. There are relationships and major life choices at stake, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a game.
Antonio seeks refuge with ex-girlfriend, Mariana (Mariana Dias), perhaps looking to turn lemons into lemonade by effecting a reconciliation now that he has nowhere else to go. Mariana is having none of it, though she does allow Antonio to crash, as long as he’s quiet enough not to wake the Brazilian girl, Débora (Deborah Viegas) who has rented Mariana’s spare room for a few nights en route to Moscow. Antonio and Débora do meet, however, and end up falling into bed.
The narrator of Dostoevsky’s story concludes by thanking the object of his impossible affections for the instant of bliss they shared, but Mouramateus tellingly changes the inflection here, to have Antonio, lying in rumpled sheets with this near stranger, marvel at enjoying “a whole moment of happiness!” But then Débora leaves anyway, and Antonio goes on with his life less concerned with absent love than with helping his friend Johnny (Daniel Pizamiglio) stage his ambitious, meta-theater piece (also partly based on “White Nights,” but morphing into a facsimile of Antonio’s life).
In retrospect, we can roughly call that Antonio One, a single-line story that lays down the film’s x-axis. But with skilfully dreamlike transitions, so we’re never quite sure where one begins and the other ends, Mouramateus introduces Antonios Two and Three and the film becomes progressively richer and more dimensional. By the time we’re in the final third, the clever little flourishes, callbacks, and repetitions to the previous chapters take on a dizzily pleasurable circularity, like in the early films of Hal Hartley. Antonio again meets Débora for the first time, this time on her way back from Moscow and the same tenuous connection flickers between them once more.
There are wit and wisdom and a kind of “Before Sunrise” wistfulness in this slight little film, and it’s shot through with an unobtrusively lyrical affection for being young and aimless in even the less obviously lovely quarters of lovely Lisbon. And in its celebration of theatricality and its faith in the power of performance to bring us to cathartic realizations about ourselves, it would make a good companion piece to Josephine’s Decker‘s darker, more troubled “Madeline’s Madeline.”
But its rarest quality is that zigzag skein of playful optimism that runs through it like a cats-cradle. For many filmmakers, especially younger ones, the metatextual movie is an excuse to affect an air of world-weariness or cynicism, disguising a lack a real-life experience with jaded commentary that amounts to “jeez, would you look at these assholes?” Mouramateus avoids that pitfall boldly, unafraid to be, of all the uncool things in this world, romantic. All yearning Dostoevskian heroes suspect that there is only one elusive person in the whole world with whom they’re meant to be. Perhaps they’re right, suggests “Antonio One Two Three,” but perhaps we get infinite chances to be with them. [B+]
Crossing Europe is a festival held annually in April in Linz, Austria, which celebrates the brightest and most idiosyncratic filmmaking from across the continent, with a particular focus on European socio-political themes.