With just two features and half a dozen shorts to his name, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema, developing an exhilaratingly original, truly head-scratching, and inexplicably beguiling approach to filmmaking. Combining the meta-fictional gamesmanship and mystery of Jacques Rivette with the blurring of documentary and narrative modes that has proven a favored (and highly productive) strategy of many of today's
most gifted filmmakers (Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ulrich Seidl, and others), Gomes has confidently staked out a territory all his own. His most recent feature film, OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST is truly something new under the sun, a category-exploding whatsit that's nevertheless so seductive and effortlessly compelling from moment to moment that its wanderings between different cinematic realms (conceived as a fictional film, it transformed itself into a documentary on summer music festivals in rural Portugal when the funding fell through, only to grope its way back towards fiction during production) ultimately seem almost irrelevant. -- (C) Film Forum
Transparently a movie about a group of filmmakers who attempt to possess a particular location, Our Beloved Month relaxes into a meditation on the mysteries of place, personality, and process.
As dazzling feats of narrative acrobatics go, this ingeniously self-reflexive second feature from maverick writer-director Miguel Gomes stands in a league of its own.
Our Beloved Month Of August is a real one-off: eccentric and singular and cerebral: an arthouse event, yes, but also witty and emotionally engaged. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards - and smiling a very great deal. Try it.
This Portuguese production is a curious mixture of documentary and fiction, an adorable metalinguistic experiment that plays with blending reality and performance to tell its story. The result may not appeal to everyone, but I found it somewhat interesting.
This was honestly the worst movie I have ever seen! there was no plot or logical sequence of events. The entire 2.5 hour movie could have been condensed to 20 total minutes and nobody would even notice that anything had been removed.
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