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Cinematic representations of passion usually involve hot color schemes, sweaty images and fiery emotions, symbols of riveting and uncontrollable desire. In his 1981 masterpiece Francisca, a sprawling adaptation of Agustina Bessa-Luís’s novel Fanny Owen—itself based on true events—master filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira devilishly internalizes these melodramatic tropes, draping them in the opulent textures, swirling mustaches, and snooty stubbornness of 1850s high-society Portugal. Its key characters speak of love and lust, but each remains more beholden to the rigorous expectations of social protocols than anything else.

Their repressed emotions are left to stagnate as time passes. Free-spiritedness cannot exist in such a suspended state of ornate equilibrium, and so life becomes nothing more than mechanized routine. Like many of his generation, twenty-something José Agusto (Diogo Dória) has grown up in a state of national volatility, as Portugal transitions from the reign of Dom João VI to a society split between “liberalism and absolutism,...

"We were speaking about the infinite, about love and magnetism..." Grasshopper Film has released a new trailer for a 4K restoration of a Portuguese biographical epic called Francisca, from acclaimed filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. Camilo Castelo Branco, the author of the novel from which Oliveira adapted Doomed Love, also emerged as a character in the director's next film—Francisca—a sinister, absorbing portrait of a mutually destructive love affair. Oliveira's source text for Francisca was a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís: the book's re-telling of a troubled passage in Camilo's life, his friend José Augusto (Diogo Dória) embarked on a perverse game of marital cat and mouse with Francisca (Teresa Menezes), the woman the novelist loved, led Oliveira to new levels of stylistic and formal imagination. With its elaborate title cards, its abundance of shots in which the action is oriented directly toward the camera, its gloomy interiors, and its show-stopping gala set-pieces,...