Interview with Carlos Saboga
P.: Your previous film, Photo, depicted the 60s and 70s from a current point of view. In Photo, there was a sort of act of revenge against Portugal’s recent history, especially against the last decade of the dictatorship. Now with At An Uncertain Time, you go further back to Salazar-ruled Portugal in 1942, during World War II, with a period film.
To paraphrase Alexandre O’Neill, is Portugal a topic, a question which haunts you?
CS. : In any case, and to keep paraphrasing O’Neill, “it has nothing to do with regrets”. Indeed, if both films I directed take place in Portugal, it seems to me that they both question the time period rather than the country. If I still have an issue with Portugal, it definitely isn’t an identity problem or an act of revenge. It used to be. But after so many years of separation, Portugal is, for me, above all a language and a memory. I must add, I am not a Benfica supporter, and fado isn’t, among others, the kind of music I prefer.
P.: The question of forced exile – addressed here through the two French war refugees – is back, but this time in a distinct form.
CS.: Maybe – I don’t know – because exile, forced or chosen, is an interesting starting point in dramatic terms that allows the author to have a point of view which is, let’s say, more distant on both edges – the one that was left and the one that is reached. But I suppose that autobiography isn’t a complete stranger to this attraction for the exiled, like a vague scent of desertion, betrayal and even… The subsequent feeling of culpability that eats away at them…
P.: n that « closed world » where everyone seems to have a secret, inspector Vargas ends up adopting a totally different behavior than what we could expect from a PIDE inspector-in-chief – as opposed to his subaltern Jasmim. Is this due to the fact that he left the country to fight in Flanders during World War I? A war Laura calls “the other war”, to which he answers there’s only one continuous war, and no safe place.
CS.: I think Vargas is, after the two French, the third exiled of the film, a latent one – but a radical one, because he doesn’t even believe in the possibility of a shelter. He is a dead man on hold. A “stranger”. The experience in Flanders, the breath of death on the battlefield, seem to have convinced him that war is an ineluctable condition of man. It is probably what leads him to withdraw from others. And from his feelings.
P.: Ilda, the teenage daughter, has a strong will to live. She is always attentive to noises and signs from the outside. Simultaneously, she feels an intense passion for her father, physical and incestuous, which she herself reveals when she fantasizes while reading an episode from Loth’s daughters in the Old Testament.
CS.: Ilda is the opposite of Vargas. Her vitality, her desire for her father’s recognition, are what drives the action. Neither treason nor crime will make her back off.
P.: The title of the film, At An Uncertain Time, in a way agrees with the idea that chance often ends up playing a decisive role in everyone’s life. And that lives unfold in the “places it passes through, or halfway between”, just like what Portugal was for war refugees at that time, and like the passage between the hotel and the annex, which is where the film comes to a resolution.
CS.: In fact, I stole the title from Primo Levi’s poem Ad ora incerta, which itself was borrowed from the Latin proverb Mors certa, hora incerta.
P.: Your work as a scriptwriter is plentiful and well-recognized, and you have worked with great directors. In an interview, you said that scriptwriters often feel frustrated in a way, because the result never matches what they had idealized on paper. Between this film’s shooting and editing, has the director Carlos Saboga made many changes to what the writer Carlos Saboga had written?
CS.: The written part was partially changed (the flesh is weak)… The spirit remained unchanged. I have to add that, even before I directed my first film, I always considered that the director had the right to make the written part his own. That’s the rule of the game. In return, the general ignorance with which the critic looks at the scriptwriter’s work seems illegitimate to me.
P.: You’re working again with Mário Barrosso, who was also cinematographer on Photo, and with whom you worked as a scriptwriter on the two feature films he directed – Doomed Love (Um Amor de Perdição), a contemporary adaptation of Camilo’s masterpiece, and The Miracle According to Salomé (O Milagre Segundo Salomé), which is an adaptation of José Rodrigues Miguéis’s novel on Portugal under the First Republic. Cinematography is extremely important in the creation of this oppressive atmosphere that the country was in.
CS.: I have been working with Mário Barroso since the end of the 70s, if I take into account the short films and aborted projects. His role in the two films I directed was essential.