The power of Portuguese filmmaker Joao Canijo’s Mal Viver (Bad Living) lies in its form that’s innovative and intense, provocative and unsettling, all at the same time. The deep dive into the minds of three generations of women who run a family hotel, pivots entirely on the many conversations of the key dramatis personae, that expose the baleful web of relationships that they are caught in. The film is also pertinent in how it underscores the inability of people in dealing effectively with mental health issues of their near and dear ones, turning the afflicted more vulnerable than help heal them.
At a time when the winter film festivals—Sundance, Rotterdam and Berlin—are about to roll, it’s felicitous to have encountered the film that won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at Berlin, was Portugal’s entry to the Oscars and played in the European Union Film Festival in India.
Canijo also made an accompanying film to Bad Living called Living Bad that zoomed in on the other side—lives of the guests visiting the hotel, scattered glimpses of which are given to us in the former.
The world of the five women at the core is akin to the hotel that they are trying desperately to save from an imminent financial collapse. Their relationships with each other are in similar decay. Weighed down by personal conflicts and perennial squabbles with each other they have turned bitter, resentful and toxic towards each other.
There is a theatre-like feel to the chamber piece cinema with Leonore Teles’ fly on the wall camera turning the audience into an unconscious participant in issues of the individuals on screen.
Canijo’s character-driven approach to writing makes it all about mothers and daughters, their inability to love each other and display maternal instinct on the one hand and respect for parents on the other. “You are using my daughter against me, but you can’t be mother to your daughters,” Piedade yells at Sara at one point.
Canijoe doesn’t wait for the tension to build gradually in the narrative, kicks it off right in the first scene when Piedade’s (Anabela Moreira) daughter Salome (Madalena Almeida) lands at the hotel, accompanied by her maternal grandmother Sara (Rita Blanco). “I don’t like surprises,” she says, puncturing the expected excitement and warmth of the moment and cruelly ignoring the fact that Salome has lost her father. Sisters Raquel (Cleia Almeida) and Angela (Vera Barreto) complete this world of five lost souls though Piedade with her neurotic condition gets to bear the brunt of it. “She is always rushing to get nowhere”, “She only thinks of herself”, say others of her. “Everything is so difficult”, “I don’t know how to love somebody”, “Love is agony”, Piedade admits of her own accord.
Canijo constructs scenes impeccably. For instance the uneasy silence between Piedade and Salome as they sit at two corners of the sofa in a wonderful scene towards the beginning for instance, the always furrowed brows of the former in a passive aggressive match with the vacant, inscrutable visage of the latter. He is as much a craftsman in leading from one scene to the other, piling them atop each other. The idea is to offer multiple perspectives on the common, shared situations without quite upholding one or decrying another. It gives complexity to the relationships. Truth is rendered hidden. It is left unaccountable because there are as many versions of it as the people. Fragments of veracity from which to draw out the larger picture.
The film does get incredibly sad and unrelentingly depressing but the five actresses lend a genuineness to the narrative with their unvarnished performances. Most effective, however, is the silent screams and quiet devastation with which things come a full circle eventually from the chaos and cacophony of argumentations that the film is essentially all about. You leave Bad Living feeling a tragic sense of loss.
