Once a colonialized country gets its independence it has to go in search of its identity, because like its resources, its original identity has been stripped by the colonialist. Left impoverished, it then becomes dependent on its former oppressor, the influence of the colonial power still permeating an ostensibly free society; a new form of colonialism has settled in, neocolonialism. This tension is one of the main themes of Pedro Pinho’s immersive second feature I Only Rest in the Storm (O riso e a faca), in which the Portuguese director takes his time to tackle the prickly relationship between locals and outsiders in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony. At three-and-a-half hours the film has a chance to take a deep dive not only into the toxicity and inevitable unraveling of soft colonialism, but also to show the proverbial fish-out-of-water perspective from the point of view of those supposedly holding the power. Not quite the masterstroke of slow cinema it could have been due to its meandering structure and its tendency to not fully connect some if its scenes, I Only Rest in the Storm is nevertheless an important milestone in Portuguese cinema when it comes to reckoning with its colonial past.
To connect its capital with a forest on the other side of the desert and provide opportunity for the communities in the hinterland, a road is being built in the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), a Portuguese environmental engineer, joins the project on behalf of an NGO in order to protect a precarious biosphere. As a white man he feels out of place in the city, but gradually blends in with the local population through his connection with the queer Gui (Jonathan Guilherme) and the outgoing Diára (Cleo Diára), two friends with an intimate, though not romantic, relationship. As work on the project presents him with challenge after challenge, from corruption and attempts at bribery to tense relationships between the local workforce and their white expat overseers, Sérgio increasingly sinks into an identity crisis; is he part of the neocolonial whites or of the local community that accepts him at arm’s length, but to whom he will always remain an outsider?
Early on, the film masterfully foreshadows this identity tug-of-war that will take hold of Sérgio; when he tries to blend in with the locals by helping famers build a mud dam to protect their crops, he sinks deeper into the mud and gets a nasty cut from an oyster hidden underneath. It’s a nice metaphor for a character that reminds one of Don Diego de Zama, protagonist of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, who similarly feels out of place, a stranger in a strange land. Thematically the films have much in common, even if Sérgio is a neocolonialist and Don Diego an actual one. Like Martel’s masterpiece, I Only Rest in the Storm is visually impressive, shot in a very wide format that often makes the outdoor environments feel hostile towards Sérgio and the others. Pinho alternates between straight edges for interior scenes and vignetting for outdoors, giving the latter scenes a ’70s spaghetti Western look in which Sérgio is the Clint Eastwood loner. Except he is not a self-assured gunslinger, but an increasingly confused man struggling with his sexuality and his infatuation for Diára. This eventually leads to a cuckolded Sérgio watching as Diára and another man are getting it on, until Sérgio can no longer contain himself and joins in. One wonders if there were intimacy coordinators on set, as the scene contains moments of unsimulated sex between the three actors, but the result is sure to be one of the year’s most erotic scenes.
Pinho takes his time with these scenes; in similar fashion an earlier moment between drunk Sérgio and a prostitute is stretched to an almost uncomfortable length, entirely the point as the encounter is meant to be uncomfortable. The length of I Only Rest in the Storm will be an issue for some audiences, but Pinho merely adapts the film’s rhythm to the locale; West Africa has its own pace, and as Sérgio has to adapt to it, so does the audience. Once you get on the film’s wavelength, which might take a while, the film starts to make more sense. Unfortunately the director tends to break that rhythm by not letting scenes naturally flow into each other, as if the connecting tissue was left on the cutting-room floor. One moment we’re witnessing a tender exchange between Sérgio and Gui (both actors give fabulous performances, as does Cleo Diára), the next we’re seeing Sérgio discussing traditional customs with a villager as if in some ethnographic documentary. This disjointed nature prevents I Only Rest in the Storm from reaching true masterpiece status, but even at its massive length Pedro Pinho has created an impressive film about the corrosive nature of post-colonialism, with both the subjugated and the oppressor struggling to find their place in a new world.
