A Nossa forma de vida

She comments on the happenings and gestures of passers-by. He does his gym listening to Soviet songs. From the eighth-floor heights of their control tower overlooking the river Douro, Armando and Maria – a talkative couple now in their eighties – let the world flow through them just as it is. And it doesn’t look too good. Be it the man rummaging through the dustbins or the back-page news, the telltale signs of the present crisis, particularly in Portugal, are just below the surface. “In Volgograd, we visited an amazing sea-wall”, recalls the man at the sight of a passing plane. “He abandoned us”, concludes his wife. Beneath the husband’s “Ostalgia”, an insidious battle of the sexes soon becomes apparent. The family ties between the filmmaker and the couple (his grandparents) are never taken as a subject for the film. Uncluttered by family sentiments, the comic side of their domestic rituals borders on the absurd, as do the texts of Armando, who is a spare-time poet. Through the subtle framing and deceptive simplicity of his cuts, Marques’ experienced editing lends an epic dimension to what we thought, wrongly, were narrow lives.