Pai Nosso: Os Últimos Dias de Salazar
A very weird mix of psychological drama about the death of a feeble old man, and farcical derangement of an ex-dictator that lives in a Potemkin village with actual ministers pretending to sign documents.
The governess is another delusional household dictator, drunk with power, hitting the maids with a rolled up newspaper. Since her power comes for him, she is sadly going back to being just an unemployed spinster.
What happened is that the guy fell from a chair and had some brain bleeding. He had surgery, but had a stroke afterwards.
He wasn’t that old, but he was extremely private and prone to fits of depression. Since anti-depressants hadn’t been invented yet, Nazi amphetamines is the next best thing.
He was famously chaste, apparently from an early trauma of falling in love with the daughter of his father’s boss, and getting brutally put down by aristos.
His few relationships were secret, brief, and possibly asexual. I bet his hands were hairy to the max.
The stroke made him hallucinate, represented by people with animal heads (better effects than Immortal), daemonic turkeys, chickens, and sheep. The maids appear for a bit as the three witches from Macbeth, all “double double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble”.
The final scene comes out of nowhere, you need to know both Maria and Salazar were extremely against smoking.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.