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A Canção de Lisboa (1933)
The sweet and naïf Portugal
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** This movie is surely one of the most delicious movies I've ever seen. It's simple, funny, naïf, and intelligent. It reflects some of the most important factors of the portuguese student. Vasco Leitão is a medicine student in Lisbon (in the old Faculty of Campo de Santana, that still exists), living from the money that his old aunts from the country-side, send him, thinking he is an example of dignity and science. Though the young student, is more like a bohemian, who likes to dance, drink, and flirt young girls. Sudden he is thrown out of the room he rented, the aunts decide to come to Lisbon, and he fails to achieve the degree. The student tries, to illude his aunts by telling them he is already a doctor, but they discover the trick, and cut the funds from wich he was living. A rich friend of his(Carlos, played by Manoel de Oliveira, the director), gets him a job singing fado. The movie ends with his marriage, already a doctor and in peace with everybody. This movie is the classic "it all ends up well", and it's a marvelous metaphor of the portuguese society of th 1930's, that wasn't that happy. Many aspects, sayings and situations are still real in Portugal, the students still like to sing and to be bohemians, people still say "fixe", and many other things. It's the beginning of the Golden Era of portuguese cinema, and a movie that people still watches and loves it.