You don’t need to have seen Paulo Rocha’s 1963 classic The Green Years to enjoy Where Is This Street? or With No Before Or After (screening out of competition in Locarno.) The two films are, though, inextricably linked. In their latest collaboration, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata are paying direct tribute to Rocha.
The filmmakers in Lisbon and have shot their film in the same spaces as The Green Years. They’ve used Rocha’s screenplay as a blueprint. They even have Isabel Ruth, the legendary and still sprightly Portuguese actress who co-starred in the 1963 film and is now in her 80s, appearing on camera.
However, their film, made during lockdown, is a documentary essay with a jazz-like feel, not a drama.
The Green Years tells the story of the tragic romance between a free-thinking housemaid and a young man who has come to Lisbon to work for his uncle’s shoe business. The film won the Best First Film award at the 1964 Locarno Festival.
“I think I saw it first on TV. It must have been in the 80s,” Rodrigues remembers. When he later when to film school, Rocha was one of his teachers. “He was very influential on me.”
Rocha, who had lived in Japan, was passionate about the work of the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, and communicated that passion to Rodrigues. He also believed (as Rodrigues puts it) “that the stories of film are hidden in the places where you shoot them. He was obsessed by this idea of places having mysteries.” This was partly what both films are about – the mysteries of Lisbon.
Rodrigues later saw The Green Years again, on the big screen. He realised that one of the locations within the film was just a short distance from his own apartment, visible from his window. “The film was shot in the area where I have always lived and I live in my grandparents’ apartment, in a building that my grandfather built.”
This part of town used to mark the border between the city and the countryside. Rocha loved to explore the parks, streets and squares in the neighbourhood.
On Rodrigues’ recommendation, Guerra da Mata also watched The Green Years. “What struck me was how contemporary that film looked, how modern for the time, not just in the way it was shot but in the music and especially the storytelling.”
Shooting on Where Is The Street? began in 2019, before the pandemic. “Covid happened in the beginning of 2020,” Rodrigues remembers. “Somehow, the film got infected by Covid and it became something else.”
The two directors were following the structure of The Green Years closely. They tried hard to use the precise places where Rocha had filmed and the exact camera positions he had used. “It was almost like an urban archaeological investigation,” Guerra da Mata says of their painstaking research which involved consulting old maps and aerial photographs. They interviewed anyone they could find who remembered the making of Rocha’s movie. There was one key difference – there were no actors in their film other than Ruth.
“All over the world [during Covid], we went through empty places, empty cities, emptiness,” Rodrigues notes. “Our film has a lot to do with what is cinema…if you take [out] narrative, what are you left with? Sound, photography, camera movements, time,” co-director Guerra da Mata adds.
Whereas The Green Years concludes with the girl being shot by her boyfriend, Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata end their film in more optimistic fashion. There is a spectacular musical sequence featuring Ruth singing as cars converge around her. This symbolises her resuscitation. The original film showed the boyfriend caught in the middle of a traffic jam after committing his crime.
“We didn’t want to film her as a nostalgic character who came from the 1960s film. We wanted to film her as she is now…what she likes to do now is to sing. She composes her own songs and she writes poetry,” Rodrigues explains. “We wanted to end the film in a positive way. The film is a portrait not just of Lisbon but of Isabel Ruth and the way see her now.”
This was also the directors’ own personal portrait of their home city during the pandemic.
They describe Where Is The Street as “an autonomous film” but hope that it will encourage viewers who haven’t seen it yet to search out The Green Years too. “If they go and see it afterwards, I would be happy about that…but there isn’t much to understand in our film. It is what it is. It is in a way a jazzy portrait of Lisbon – an always empty Lisbon…[at] a unique moment in time. We try to capture that crazy moment,” says Guerra da Mata.
“On the other hand, if someone has seen The Green Years, [they] will have a different perspective to the film. That is undeniable,” Rodrigues acknowledges.
The city was changing rapidly at the time Paulo Rocha was making The Green Years. Portugal was still under a dictatorship but the 60s were also the period of the Portuguese new wave in cinema. “Things were changing socially and politically – and the film marks the debut of that, the first film of that movement.”
Rodrigues is one of the most prolific and successful Portuguese directors of his generation. He makes fiction and documentary. His work is often shown at major festivals. His recent musical fantasy Will-O’-the-Wisp screened in the Cannes Directors Fortnight earlier this summer. He has also worked many times with Guerra da Mata, his partner, who is a production designer and scriptwriter as well as a director.
“What we do, João Pedro and I, we work a lot at home, we decide exactly what we want to do. Then, during the shooting, he is in charge of it,” Guerra da Mata says of their collaboration.
Many films during the pandemic were shot indoors. However, Where Is The Street? was largely made outdoors in “this haunted city” where the only vehicles on the roads were police cars, fire engines and ambulances, and where the parks had a few lone walkers and joggers.
Locarno marks the world premiere for the project. It will then begin its festival run in earnest before release in Portugal next year to mark the 60th anniversary of The Green Years.
“Of course, it is an independent film but we also want to pay homage to my teacher – one of the great Portuguese directors and to one of the fundamental films of Portuguese cinema,” Rodrigues ends.
Where Is This Street? Or With No Before world premieres at Locarno FF August 7 2022.
