Tentação

Good screenplay,realistic in our nowadays. Great performance of Almeida,Burstoff and Infante

This is really a great movie of the new generation of Portuguese actors and producers.Tho its not as good as the old portuguese movies, i think this movie started a new concept in the way Portuguese make and see their own movies. A wonderful representation of Joaquim D'Almeida, Cristina Câmara ( what a debut), and, as always, Diogo Infante, which is for me, the best Portuguese Actor of our times.As a resumee, this movie is a movie everyone should see.

In the 90s, parents were paranoid and feared for their kids and drug addiction. Portuguese movies surely didn't miss the boat and Tentação was the most popular, becoming a box office hit. And in spite of its dark subject, teachers in my school still decided to show it in classes.

It was nice to revisit the film all these years later. Joaquim Leitão crafted what is probably the best movie of his career and one of the strongest performances by Joaquim de Almeida. A dark story about a priest who goes deep down on a hole to bring back a drug addict back to the light, all in the name of love.

It has the usual technical limitations and I have some issues with Cristina Câmara performance (her first role). But the story carries some strong moments.

There are some beautifully realized moments in this picture, specially the ones concerning nocturnal shots. But despite being the greatest grossing portuguese film in history, there are a lot of plotholes and failures for it to pass flawless. The plot is simple. A priest tries to assist a drug addict and becomes addicted to both her and drugs. They start to fall into the hands of narcotics and soon they do anything to urge their needs. But there will have to be a redemption. And meanwhile the film takes his time to display every social matter in the last years. This, mixed with good perfomances from the protagonists, somewhat between good and bad from the secondary players, a good cinematography and editing and a strikingly good score (probably the best thing in the picture) makes this a watchable film but no more than that. Joaquim Leitão did "Adão e Eva" and hit bulls' eye. He did this one and, despite earning even more money, didn't reach the novelty of the other. Still, films like these are good hopes to what the future moviemaking in Portugal can be, specially in technical terms.

Joaquim Leitão is one of the new wave portuguese directors and we must congratulate him for his will and dedication to new portuguese cinema, but the fact is that Tentação despite having a great background idea, it just vanishes in disappointing interpretations (Cristina Camâra is not an actress, just check "Inferno" and I have seen Joaquim de Almeida perform a lot better) and mindless scenes and nonsense.

Tentação actually had something to be a good movie but it just couldn't really make it because it's way too superficial. Some dialogues are quite horrible and things aren't just clear, just like in that scene Father Antonio (Joaquim de Almeida) rehabilitates himself from an heroine addiction by staying one week locked in a hotel room (gosh, is that really that simple?)

For the future I hope new wave directors like Joaquim Leitão will make it into portuguese cinema and make more and better movies, much better than "Tentação" and surely better than Leitão's last movie "Inferno" which I can't even classify.