My Little Seamstress

A film that left little mark, but shows the difficulties of making cinema under a dictatorship... and how beautiful Porto was before they ruined the city.

Portuguese cinema has a restricted range of great classics that everyone knows and that still continue to win audiences today, through regular screenings on RTP (the state radio and television group) and a certain “cult” status. “A Costureirinha da Sé” is not one of those films. It appears late, years after the “golden age” of cinema in Portugal, and seems strange due to the fact that it is a color film. In fact, as far as I could understand, this was one of the first Portuguese films in color. It is a step forward in the technical field, bringing to Portugal the colorization technologies that had already been in vogue for years in the USA, namely the “cinemascope”.

The film was created and directed by Manuel Guimarães, a filmmaker who until then drew his inspiration from Italian neo-realism. In close collaboration with Alves Redol, he had made several films in which he portrayed the prevailing poverty and backwardness of the country, such as “Nazaré” and “Vidas Sem Rumo”, and was punished by the censorship with merciless cuts that turned the films in an amorphous and incomprehensible soup, which would condemn them to box office failure. Let us not forget that, at this time, cinema was reviewed and censored by the authorities. It was because of this that, after several films documenting sporting events, Guimarães wanted to make this film, more naive and less ideologically charged, which was better received by the censors, but whose financing depended on the sponsorship of brands that inserted a lot of visible and irritating advertising.

Unfortunately for Manuel Guimarães, those who never understood this change in style and position were the Portuguese critics and academics, who seemed to have appreciated his initial stance. It's easy to criticize when you don't feel the difficulty of creating culture in a dictatorial regime. There are those who resist and pay the price, there are those who prefer to do nothing more, and there are those who try to align themselves with the system. Guimarães seems to have opted for the third way, and I don't criticize him. After the failure of this film, several short films that the world forgot and two or three more feature films, Guimarães would end his career in his death. He even saw democracy return to Portugal, but he did not live long enough to enjoy it.

The film did not leave a permanent mark on national cinema and is rarely shown today. As I said, there is a lot of advertising that is quite noticeable, and that the Portuguese are not used to. That's why he displeased everyone. It has some good songs and the actors make a decent effort, although none of them are particularly good or outstanding. The colorization is very beautiful, the cinematography couldn't be more elegant, and the film's technical work is effective. Furthermore, the film makes excellent use of the filming locations in the city center of Porto. For me, it is absolutely delicious to see these images of my hometown when my parents were young, and to see, for example, the gardens on Aliados Avenue, where I myself still played as a child. I still remember, too, when people lived in the old houses next to the Cathedral, where today we only see tourists with a thousand and one languages ​​and an indispensable trolley rolling along the rocks behind their feet. For me, this is the film's greatest value: seeing Porto, my Porto, when it still belonged to the people of Porto and had not become an amusement park for wealthy foreigners, as was the wish of Lisbon's rulers and our Lord Mayor, whose name I refuse to speak.