John From (2015), the debut film of Portuguese director João Nicolau, is the perfect film to watch during these strange summer months, with their canceled vacation plans and the inability to see anything beyond the next door high-rise, months unlike any others we’ve seen before. Here is a pre-pandemic film that examines the summertime languor inside a residential neighborhood in Lisbon, following the lives of a couple of teenage girls that have nothing better to do but listen to music, go to a house party every once in a while or sunbathe for the better part of the day. There’s no going to a festival or to the beach, no sudden stunt: Nicolau seems to literally employ the concept of a topicless film, of the “world in which nothing ever happens” – and the certainty with which he chains together the film’s languishing shots, without feeling the pressure to step on any speed pedal that is aching to be finally pushed, goes to show that the filmmaker has already found his own voice. And it's with this composed and self-assured voice that we are told that any escape or escapade on part of the teenagers requires quite an effort. There’s nothing more alien to this universe than the concept of a deus ex machina which would “miraculously” offer the characters any sound reason to wake up in the morning.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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