Lavagante
Slow and steady, black and white, reason and emotion, communists and secret police, fado and opera, wrapped in massive amounts of cigarettes.
An adaptation from a book by the same guy that did Balada da Praia dos Cães and O Lugar do Morto (that the producer had some kind of deep-seated hatred for, ironically).
Casanova Guy meets experienced girl, they fall in love, they get to together but politics prevents their relationship from evolving. They will always have that lunch in the nice restaurant.
Our dude is actually a surgeon, so in a time of police repression, he is asked to go save some comrade, and he obliges. The nurse is the one politically active, but our protagonist is just a doctor… He help that comrade, but this means he is being chased around by cops. Maybe this is not accurate, the secret cops are chasing her, since the inspector thinks she is a virgin, and wants her as a concubine. She declines.
Our protagonist remains out of prison as long the girl submits to the inspector, abandoning the love of her life.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.