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With: Sónia Bandeira, Fábio Oliveira, Joaquim Carvalho, Manuel Soares
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Written by: Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo
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Directed by: Miguel Gomes
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MPAA Rating: Not Rated
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Language: Portuguese, with English subtitles
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Running Time: 147
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Date: 05/21/2008
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Our Beloved Month of August (2009)
Fiery Romance
By Jeffrey M. Anderson This head-scratcher comes from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes. If the film is to be believed, he started out with a giant tome of a screenplay about a girl, and her cousin and her over-protective father, but was unable to raise the money to shoot it. So the movie starts like a documentary about rural Portugal, with colorful interviews and great footage of local bands performing on stage. (They look like small-town fishermen, shopkeepers and beer-drinkers rather than performers; can everybody in Portugal sing this well?) Then, at some point, some of the folks we've met begin to turn into movie characters -- a girl whose job is to sit atop a tower and watch for forest fires becomes the movie's heroine -- and we get our little story of illicit romance and other amorous troubles. Our Beloved Month of August is a very long 150 minutes, and it requires a great deal of patience before it starts making sense. It's unwieldy and often frustrating, but ultimately quite rewarding. The final scene is so lovely and mysterious that you'll leave with a smile. The movie opens in limited U.S. release September 3, 2010.
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