José and Pilar

Yeah, that's a "love story."

...or given the message of his books, profoundly hypocritical in his own life

José e Pilar isn't (just?) a documentary, it's a well crafted story that no one wrote, that unfolded as the 4 years of filming passed by.

You won't just see the Nobel award winner José Saramago, his love for writing and the tremendous respect for the people he wrote for. You will see first hand and for real how two people can be so in sync, so complementary and yet so different.

And how life spins more and faster than the Earth. How some people actually do live forever. And how people sometimes take a long time to find their calling and their true love.

Corny as it may sound said by me, you'll find nothing but beauty in this film.

A true love story indeed and a real one. The Portuguese novelist José Saramago (1998 Nobel Prize winner) knew in the second half of his life, by chance, the Spanish journalist Pilar Del Rio, more than 20 years younger than him and they fell in love with each other almost at once. They lived together till his death in 2010. From a certain moment on they went to live in Lanzarote (Canary Islands) since he found much more support from the Spanish authorities than from the Portuguese ones at the time. They eventually married each other. This movie shows the last years of their lives in a documentary form with great quality. The images speak for themselves without the need of great explanations and the dialogues between the couple and with other people are so natural, spontaneous and true and supported by a very intelligent shooting and cut that we can feel how that relationship between novelist and wife is illuminated by a true love, a love that doesn't have great visual expression in manners and attitudes but whose depth we can feel in the constant cooperation and assistance Pilar gives to José not only personal but also and very important, in his writing activities, being simultaneously a careful and loving wife and an efficient secretary and public relations. Thus she contributed very much to his literary success and we can also feel his gratitude for that. This documentary real love story will touch you more than many fiction movies of the same kind.

José Saramago's figure was outstanding. One had to read his books till the end. But, most fascinating was his relationship with a more outstanding woman, Pilar del Rio. This tender documentary really shows us the ties that put them together along the years. A love story that outfits time and space. A real thing. The director shows us the daily routine of José and Pilar and the tenderness of gestures, beyond words. One understands very well what they felt for each other from the day they first met till the death of Saramago and the desire of Pilar to fulfill a true wish: to have his ashes divided in Lanzarote and Portugal, the founding of a Foundation in Lisboa, and the visits to his birthplace Azinheira do Ribatejo.

It's so hard to make an engaging documentary. The usual process is to make the facts of stories you're supposed to be told into a coherent narrative line, even if in reality that line isn't so clear. That will provide the audiences with a story, something to follow. But how you follow that story is usually in a more external way than how you watch fiction, because in documentary you can't or won't have the same devices to fold you into the thing. You have always that trick on reenact some stuff, if the theme is history. That's lame to me, and lazy.

Now here you have something really interesting. The film shows us countless excerpts of the lives of the 2 protagonists throughout the course of about 2 years. The film is presented as a reportage, more than a documentary, meaning that images are what you make of it, words come up apparently loosely. No bent narrative is delivered to you. Or so it seems.

Underneath this apparently random display of images, there's a subtle layered structure. The life of the couple José/Pilar in the period of the film mapped to the story of the elephant in the book Saramago is writing. The story that this film displays mapped into the larger story of Saramago's life, with all its weight in the story of literature and Portuguese culture, as we get it in between the lines in several moments of the narrative. The whole idea of journey and encounter mapped into the love story of José and Pilar.

And ultimately, as the title denounces, that story is central here. The idea of a pair of people bound by the art of one of them, who chooses to share it, allow the other half to be a part of it. Live as one, that's the beautiful part of the story. I'm glad they chose to share a bit of that story with as, by allowing us to get into it.

His art matters. He is a humanist, has profound ideas, truly powerful ideas, and changed language, invented a new way on which people can express.

There is one moment when the metaphor for journey mapped into people's lives is perfect: in Saramago's hometown, one street has his name, another street which crosses the other one has her name. Crossed paths.

My opinion: 4/5

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