The collapse of a building’s wall is usually no cause for celebration. War, natural disaster, and images of ruin flood onto our timelines as if there were no tomorrow. In cinema, however, collapsing walls have always had comic potential: the one that falls around Buster Keaton in STEAMBOAT BILL JR. (1928), for instance, with Keaton positioned with calculated coincidence in the precise location of the falling façade’s open window frame, leaving him unharmed. A few centimetres to either side and his craft of stoic perseverance would have cost him his life.
Susana Nobre’s film CIDADE RABAT is full of collapsed (and soon-to-collapse) exterior walls; nothing, however, ever seems to escalate. It begins with intact memories, from a still intact apartment building. Offscreen, the narrator recapitulates the households of her childhood. In the gloomy light of day, Paulo Menezes’ camera profiles each closed door while the text—soberly, without value judgment—traces the contours of the lives that play out behind them. Interposed are the shadows of an old lift’s lattice doors, inscribing shifting patterns across walls and floors. The camera then pauses at the gears of the mechanism that has transported people up and down all these years. It looks—and rattles—like an old film projector.
Nobre calls her film a “melancholy comedy about grief”; its brittle humour unfolds with slowness and discretion. In the building profiled at the outset of the film lives the mother (Paula Bárcia), seen examining and ripping up old photos without rage, without grief. Her daughter Helena (Raquel Castro) later pockets one of the images from this mound of torn-apart moments. The flat is filled with the kind of poignant illumination found only in the homes of parents grown old, gradually disappearing from the world along with the dying of the light. But new life pushes forward in the form of Helena’s teenage daughter Maria (Laura Afonso), who splits her time between her father and her mother. Any expectations of escalation, however, are dashed once again: they never treat one another with anything more severe than the gentle withdrawal of a hand.
Helena is a film producer; something less glamorous than in sounds, in an economically downtrodden country like Portugal. With everything, Helena has to spend and save carefully. She explains scope of action to her director, João Allen: he wants a collapsing exterior wall, but the limited budget means he has to make do with an excavator clearing away a little debris. Helena's facial expressions are parsimonious as she roams Columbo-like through alleyways—hidden behind Woody Allen glasses and decked in an oversized coat—before seemingly swallowed up again and again by the greenery growing at the edge of the frame.
A parent dying isn’t necessarily the moment a world collapses. It is more a moment in which all the already existing fragments seek to be reassembled.
Between remnants of walls and the half-intact buildings of the alleyways, migrants have built up a world of allotment gardens and backyards repurposed for parties. They work for a little extra money as participants in Helena’s current film. She pays wages in cash to recipients who are largely undocumented. Everything is done properly and officiously, with any trouble cleared up in a few words. Helene gets a phone call at one point and removes herself from the midst of the rubble; we do not overhear the conversation. A parent dying isn’t necessarily the moment a world collapses. It is more a moment in which all the already existing fragments wish to be reassembled.
After the mother’s only slightly odd funeral—even here, things are quickly fine again—a little levity enters into the film. Helena smiles, if only when watching others dance. And she dances, if only when dead drunk. At three times over the legal limit, she’s pulled over by police. A later Islamophobic remark by the policemen leaves her looking stone-cold sober, but open conflict once again fails to break out. Even the community service she’s sentenced to by the polite officer opens up new possibilities she’s happy to work with. Helena’s story can be read as that of a woman unable to shed her sober-mindedness.
This is the space of gently absurd futility in which CIDADE RABAT moves: it is about loss and memory, about the fragile bond with desired or remembered images. And with it the baroque, potentially comical frailty of what one person builds today and another tears down tomorrow. Unexpectedly, magical moments penetrate their way into this world—in the form of cars, lined up as if for a secret gathering. It would be no surprise to hear them sounding out, as in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA, seemingly from nowhere.
Nobre’s 2021 docudrama NO TÁXI DO JACK—in which a taxi driver who emigrated to New York in the ‘70s returns to the Portugal of the ‘90s—previously demonstrated how sobriety and euphoria, gruffness and magic, are anything but mutually exclusive. CIDADE RABAT is less linear than it is circular in its tracing of the paths on which someone may (or may not) find their way in life; those mechanisms which doggedly insist that some end up here and others there, some on top and some at the bottom.
Cosima Lutz lives in Berlin, where she works as a film critic for various online and print media, including “Die Welt” and “Filmdienst.”
Translation: Matthew James Scown
