Hovering Over the Water (Joao Cesar Monteiro, 1986)

I admired, but never quite embraced God’s Wedding, the only other film I’ve seen by Portuguese director João César Monteiro. Details are fuzzy at this point, but what struck me about that sprawling, difficult film, where Monteiro plays a tramp who becomes incredibly wealthy and buys the hand of a young nun, was its unique combination of transgression, humor, and painterly beauty. Without knowing beforehand, I wouldn’t have guessed that the director of that film was also the voice behind Hovering Over the Water, a mythic, dreamy film about a woman grieving the death of her husband.

Opening on dazzling saturated imagery of a sunset over the glistening ocean, Monteiro situates Hovering Over the Water in otherworldly beauty. This early stretch of the film is characterized by its heightened, utopian naturalism, alternating between extended conversations and scenes of fantastical wonder. Plunging us into the lives of a group of women and children living in a coastal Portuguese manor, Monteiro is more concerned with patiently watching the maid cook a whole fish, or indulging in a woman pretending to be the spirit of Norma Desmond.

Over the course of half an hour, we learn that one of the women, Laura, is a recent widow. After leaving Portugal for a year, she’s back in her former seaside residence with her children and sisters-in-law. Primarily through context clues, we sense that she’s semi-estranged from her husband’s family, and overcome with melancholy. When everyone else departs for a boating trip, she decides to stay behind.

From then on, things begin to get a bit strange. We hear a news report about the assassination of a Palestinian leader and that the perpetrator is on the run. Shortly after, while Laura suntans on the beach, a wounded man floats ashore. Laura promises Robert refuge and takes him home. Robert, an American who’s straight out of a fairy tale, disrupts the film’s more naturalist tendencies with Hollywood mannerisms. His budding relationship with Laura becomes a strange, distanced melodrama, with Monteiro’s astounding formal expressionism (an early conversation in Laura’s car takes place at dusk, with blinking taillights acting like a heartbeat behind the couple’s faces) clashing with Robert’s glaringly out of place dialogue (“You see the kind of domestic tragedy that was started by one ripe melon?”). Any love between them remains theoretical, and for the most part, they have no physical connection. It’s unclear to what extent Robert is a figment of Laura’s imagination, but it quickly becomes clear that the film’s expressive surfaces stem from Laura’s grief. After a stray kiss, Monteiro cuts to an interlude where Laura’s face slowly materializes in a mirror bathed in ghostly blue light, a moment of physicality awakening some sense of reality, which is swiftly repressed. “But you’re dead”, she whispers.

Hovering Over the Water becomes a resigned portrait of dissociation, but one where mythic beauty, and passion for the arts are the means for Laura’s recession. The film has a listless surrealism. When the rest of the family returns, for the most part, no one bats an eye when they discover Robert’s presence, and when a group of pirates storm the house looking for him (revealing that he’s not the aforementioned assassin), everyone seems to just forget about it. No one seems to be able to take anything at face value, and as the film progresses, artistic reference becomes it’s own sort of abstraction. One of the sisters-in-law describes Robert as “straight out of Hemingway”, we discover that Laura’s son is named Roberto Rossellini, while her daughter is constantly compared to Maria Callas. Even the pirates are all named after characters from A Thousand and One Nights. This is a film divorced from reality, almost willfully so. Its tragedy is expressed through its surfaces, which simultaneously represent romantic yearning and a smothering of reality. As Laura slowly fades from the narrative, she misses out on the film’s searingly intimate consummation, and a chance at new life.