Leguas (2024)

Leguas

Filmmakers Filipa Reis and João Miller Guerra are not trying to be sly in their Légua if the vastness, stillness of animals, and repetitive personal rituals didn’t already give it away, one character tells another, “You can’t take care of a haunted house.”

This is one of the few bits of transparent dialogue in an otherwise tight-lipped, understated film that always seems like it’s about to subside into its own hypnotic inertia until the filmmakers occasionally throw in more dynamic images, sound or music. What emerges is a controlled and suggestive drama about work as life and its impact on those who come after. The movie had its world premiere in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes.

“The lights are on but there’s nobody home” goes the famous cruel euphemism for madness usually applied to someone who is seemingly present yet totally vacant. In Légua (which translates to “League”), owners are rarely seen at their vast property or in their grand home somewhere close by in this district outside Porto; instead they’ve left behind loyal housekeeper Emília (Fátima Soares) and her colleague Ana (Carla Maciel), who sweep, dust, fold and squeakily polish for no one’s benefit with no apparent reason either.

Tenants could arrive any time but never do; pigs and chickens sometimes wander out of their pen and graze on the plush furniture; gathering particles of dirt don’t get up and leave themselves, so the two women keep themselves usefully busy all day long while somehow remaining insulated from the gnawing futility of it all.

Ana whose freer spirit and keener drive are suggested by her singing along to romantic Portuguese pop songs on the radio as she does her chores, plus the enthusiastic sex she has with her building-contractor husband Victor (Paulo Calatré) in his employers’ own marital bed has two get-out clauses, if only she’d see them.

First, older woman Emília has been struck down with multiple myeloma and is gradually deteriorating, requiring constant care; then a young relative of the owners sends a real-estate agent to make a valuation, whom Ana greets with unusual hostility. Her daughter Mònica (Vitória Nogueira da Silva), an able engineering student who dreams of more lively parties elsewhere, may be the part of her legacy and lineage most capable of freeing itself from all this.

It’s a simple film on the surface, its sequences of housework not as precisely formal as those in Jeanne Dielman you lean forward to try and work out what exactly Ana or Emília is doing at any given moment but the cutting and imagery blend into each other like a repetitive paste, suggesting that sometimes a study of stasis can resemble what it’s diagnosing too much.

But we emerge from Légua with something sharp and new in our bloodstream another glimpse at Portugal’s decaying landowning class where the 19th century seems to have never left and it also belongs to an interesting recent wave of Iberian and South American films about country-house upstairs-downstairs relations like this one that ask whether the “help” are just that and how they come to feel they’ve got their feet up on the furniture.

Watch Leguas For Free On Gomovies.