.png){kind=logo}
Later tonight, João Nicolau’s “Providence and the Guitar” will play concurrently in five screening rooms across Rotterdam as the opening film at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, an occasion the Portuguese filmmaker calls a “great responsibility.”
Adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s eponymous short story, “Providence and the Guitar” trails travelling artists León (Pedro Inês) and Elvira (Clara Riedenstein) as they dodge moody police officers and rivals while hopping from town to town. The period piece is peppered with sequences in the present, where the two musicians, now in a punk rock band, continue to struggle to make a living through their art. Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s world premiere in the Dutch city, Nicolau says, “It’s an immense joy” to have such a prestigious slot.
“I have never been to Rotterdam, but several colleagues have and have told me it is a vibrant festival willing to platform riskier cinema as well as smaller productions,” he adds.
“I think it was a very bold, courageous choice by the programming team to have us as the opening film, because it is not necessarily your typical opener. I say this not because of the themes that the film explores, but because of its language. There is a certain demand to it, and we open several doors to the audience and invite them in. I’m very curious about the reaction on the ground.”
Nicolau points out that the brief original short story acted as “a starting point” for the two-hour film. “I fell in love with the tone of the narrative and the characters, and I thought it deserved a feature film to translate its richness and the nuances of the language. My previous films have featured drier, more laconic characters, and I wanted to find the pleasure of exploring language.”
“I wrote a first version that followed the structure of the short story, which I called the camera version, and then I wrote the symphonic version,” he goes on when asked about the time-hopping element. “That version features sequences in the future, which are, in a way, flashbacks exploring the relationship between the main couple. I thought the themes explored in the short story were really current, so the jumps in time came naturally.”
All songs in the film are original compositions by Nicolau and creative partner João Lobo, except for one tune that uses a poem by lauded Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. The director, also an amateur musician, says music has always occupied a “central stage” in his work. “Music is a key part of human existence. If we film characters eating, working, making love, we can also film characters singing, playing and composing together.”
As for the song’s simple arrangements, Nicolau says it came from the film’s period background. Since the main characters are on the road with access only to an acoustic guitar, “there was no space or scope for big musical arrangements.”
Talking about music, Nicolau was glad to be able to work with longtime friend and popular Portuguese singer — and 2017 Eurovision winner — Salvador Sobral. “I am interested in having professional musicians try their hand at cinema in my films,” he says. “The process of casting Salvador went very well and, interestingly, he barely sings in the film. But his nature as a musician is present in all of his scenes.”
But, of course, there were several challenges in getting such an ambitious production off the ground. The greatest of them all was the production’s limited budget, given that Nicolau could not land a co-production deal with prospective partners in Belgium and France. “Providence and the Guitar” is an entirely Portuguese production, supported by the country’s national film body, the ICA.
“This lack of money ended up orienting a lot of my creative choices,” remarks the director. “We couldn’t spend a lot on production design or building entire new sets, which meant I decided to create an indefinite past. Not that this is key to the film itself, as long as we did not have contemporary elements on the screen. The past in the film could be 70 or 200 years ago.”
Despite believing the film could have been shot in “any small European village that was convenient for the co-production,” Nicolau is glad to have made the film in his native language. “I always wanted the film to be in Portuguese because, despite the original text being in English, I fell in love with the Portuguese translation. That was my starting point for all the dialogue. There was a pleasure in the language and the sound that was fundamental to me creatively.”
“Providence and the Guitar” is produced by Luís Urbano and Sandro Aguilar for O Som e a Fúria. Shellac holds international sales rights.
English (US) ·