It's a shame people who don't understand movies be allowed to write reviews like these. People who are used to go and watch commercial Schwarzenegger and Van Damme pictures at multiplexes and eat pop corns and drink Cola when they don't have nothing better to do or when they want to get it on with their girlfriends and they don't even know how to write English properly.
Cinema isn't just explosions and bombs and girls with big tits playing the cute little duckies who turn into swans and quick cut action flicks with Bruce Willis. Cinema is also art and beauty. In a world of fast-food trash movies Rui Goulart's work is to be admired from an artist's point of view. The shots are made with great insight of his soul and Venice is very well portrayed here as a dream city where his character Miguel wanders off to seek inspiration. If this film was so bad it wouldn't have been presented in São Paulo's Film Festival in Brazil and it wouldn't be the first Portuguese film to premiere in the United States of America and it wouldn't have been announced so many times by the great Portuguese critic Marcelo Rebelo De Sousa in TVI.
People don't know crap about European cinema. Manoel De Oliveira who is the oldest film director alive and makes boring movies that nobody sees is allowed to shoot with patronage from the Portuguese Government but all the other filmmakers have to survive with money from other places. Mainly their family's.
Vitorino d'Almeida is a great Portuguese music conductor and composer. He has always worked with Goulart since his first movie Em Obssessão. If he wasn't pleased with his work I don't think he would ever be involved in it again. Nevertheless he and João d'Ávila - a great Portuguese actor - keep being cast in Rui Goulart's films. I loved the movie and I identify a lot with his character. Doing movies is easy if you have a camera and people and a story. Selling it and distributing it is the hard part if nobody wants to see it. I wish you folks out there who like Fellini and Jacques Tati to give this movie a chance.