“There is a time when death is an event, an adventure, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.”
This is taken from an entry in Roland Barthes’ “Mourning Diary”, which he wrote after his mother’s death in 1977. The same words can be used to describe what Helena, CIDADE RABAT’s protagonist, is going through. Helena has spent the last two years taking care of her sick mother. After she dies, Helena resignedly accepts her grief and tries to maintain her normal work routine as well as emotionally availability for her twelve-year-old daughter Maria.
But having become intimate with the circumstances of death, an experience shared with her mother, makes Helena feel that life passes too quickly, days following each other in a wink of an eye without us realizing what is happening. This inner state is not clearly shown in the film, but Helena’s grief and identity, in their vertiginous relationship with her everyday life, acquire an unexpected significance throughout its runtime. Helena is assaulted by contradictory feelings; faced at once with life’s precarity and finitude, she seeks recourse a state of euphoria, eager to partake in whatever joy there is.
Helena realizes that everything will be forgotten and given over to the circumstances of life, which will settle things in the end. This is the founding axis of the film, both its starting point and its point of arrival.
Helena is a film producer. Her work yields a series of “anecdotes” and events that unfold within a cosmopolitan context, each involving familiar characters and commonplace occurrences. Helena is a detached witness to all of this. The interaction between money and emotions is latent in this middle-class character who, about to turn 40, is going through an identity crisis. She accepts whatever comes her way and finds joy in the impersonal.
Given the very nature of the image, cinema invites to reflections on appearance and truth, about the external aspect of life and its true identity, and Helena subsequently begins to contemplate her own reality. She gains that awareness upon returning from her mother’s house, which is also her childhood home, after her mother’s passing. That re-encounter with what is hers awakens a visible sadness in Helena and, more than that, the realization that she’s about to disappear. Helena’s mother blindly moves towards that effacement of memory by tearing up old photos in the opening of the film. Helena then realizes that everything will be forgotten and given over to the circumstances of life, which will settle things in the end. This is the founding axis of the film, both its starting point and its point of arrival. As Montaigne said, nothing is more painful than staying in a place where everything around us concerns us...Well, CIDADE RABAT follows Helena’s journey, beginning by evoking her childhood house through a text read in the first person—where everything began.
Susana Nobre
