Cidade Rabat review – elegant, subtle study of a daughter’s grief

Portuguese director Susana Nobre explores the sadness of bereavement with deadpan obliqueness in this story about a woman’s reaction to her mother’s death

There’s a studied impassivity to this elegant Portuguese movie about grief from Susana Nobre. It’s a film that maintains its near-affectless deadpan style from first to last, and declines to offer a conventional emotional payoff, or indeed the usual narrative shape that might lead to such a climax – although there is an emotional outpouring of sorts. It isn’t exactly that sadness finds its outlet in oblique or unusual ways (the heavy drinking we see is, after all, a commonplace symptom) but the way it is represented on screen is indirect.

Helena (Raquel Castro) is a production manager on a film shoot, dealing with a difficult director. She is divorced, sharing custody of a teen daughter, and in a relationship with a musician who is away on tour. Her elderly widowed mother, who lives in a Lisbon apartment block called Cidade Rabat, where Helena grew up, is talking openly about her approaching death and wants Helena to live in the flat after she’s gone – an idea that stirs up oppressive emotions.

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