The Roots of Neorealism: Aniki Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira)
We seem to be running out of ways to describe the incredible longevity of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. At the time of writing the 103-year-old is working on his latest film The Devil’s Church, after his previous work Gebo and the Shadow premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
To put his miraculous achievements in context, we should remember that Oliveira was born in 1908, the same year as David Lean, Bette Davis, James Stewart and Anna Magnani, and that he made his feature debut more than 70 years ago, as his native Portugal was entering the second decade of Salazar’s repressive regime.
As with cinema in Mussolini’s Italy, the vast majority of Portuguese films of the time were conformist. Made in 1942, Oliveira’s Aniki Bóbó was intended as a symbolic attack on his country’s dictatorship. The film was based on Rodrigues de Freitas’s short story ‘Little Millionaires’, first published in the pages of leading modernist journal Presença in the 1930s.
It tells of the rivalry between two boys, Carlitos and Eduardinho, and their attempts to win over the same girl, Teresinha. Charismatic but also a bully, Eduardinho is the leader of a group of children who play on the banks of the Douro. His love-rival Carlitos seems to be his polar opposite. Shy and naive, he nonetheless lands what he thinks is a major coup when he steals a doll Teresinha has admired in a local shop; but this by no means signals the end of the competition between the boys.
In its unvarnished depiction of the lives of children – their playfulness but also their lies, deceit and cruelty – Aniki Bóbó anticipates both De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950), even though its urban landscape is perhaps closer to An Inn in Tokyo (above).
Oliveira, like Ozu, chooses not to recreate the bustle of city life. The depopulated streets of Porto allow the director to make the contrast between the restriction inside and the freedom outside the classroom.
Adult authority, in the form of parents and schoolteachers, is viewed with great suspicion by Oliveira. Few adults are given names and we don’t even see the face of Carlitos’s mother, who appears in a handful of scenes, including a moment towards the end of the film when she wakes the boy from a nightmare presented by Oliveira in all its contorted, quasi-expressionist hysteria.
The main criticism levelled at Aniki Bóbó at the time of its release seems now to be the film’s overriding strength: its depiction of childhood not as an idyll but as a world that can be just as tumultuous and unforgiving as adulthood.