The Portuguese Woman

The Portuguese Woman is a movie about a upper class woman who marries an absentee chatelain. She travels from coastal Portugal to mountainous Northern Italy where she raises a son for her husband who much prefers the life of war away from home. Her husband is Lord von Ketten, also known as the Lord of Chains on account of how many prisoners he takes during his absurd campaigns. A stranger to his own home he has an ancestrally-bestowed belief in skirmishing that forms the entirety of his personality.

What should the Portuguese lady do in her dilapidated eyrie? Nurture animals, play music, indulge in the arts and crafts, these are her answers.

The movie is very literate, actual Mediaeval songs are used here, and the movie does pick up on a real feeling of the times, a general fear of the armed man, who might turn up at any point raping and pillaging (forty pieces of music entitled Mass of the Armed Man or Missa L'homme armé survive from the period). There are also moments of genuine feminist power. For example whey the Portuguese goes walking with her assigned tutor who proceeds to fill her head with much nonsense on the subject of the countryside. It does resonate with a contemporary feeling that men are mediating womens' interaction with the world, all too much of our intellectual heritage is sheer nonsense written down by men many years ago. This is underlined when von Ketten meets with the Bishop of Trent, who talks a haughty and toxic gibberish that von Ketten mistakes for profundity.

Still the movie is often unwelcomingly strange, such as when white rabbits are strewn on the set as if Jeff Koons took a wrong turn somewhere. The hardest choice to grasp is the frequent interruptions by Ingrid Caven, dressed in modern clothing and bathetically crooning. I started to gasp with frustration every time she appeared. There are also disbelief shattering moments, such as when the Portuguese and her relative are giggling under a stream of potato flakes. It is fun to watch in a documentary sense, as the women are clearly enjoying themselves, but it's not clear if these potato or soap flakes are meant to be snow or blossom or what, and why this artistic choice was being made, maybe it is a deliberate breaking of a dream? The relationship between the chatelaine and animals is quite bizarre and Disney-like (think Snow White mesmerising animals). Only in the world of this movie is raising a wolf cub alongside your children a good idea, for either the wolf or the human children. The ends in the only sensible move that von Ketten makes in the movie, paradoxically driving a wedge between the couple.

All this said there are moments as a view of exquisite transportation into a distant era, painterly vignettes of soldiers in a courtyard, milady swimming in a dark pond, and playing an ancient musical instrument. The movie has much to commend it, but also can crush with its impenetrable longueurs and often baffling artistic choices.