João de Deus’s musical perversions: a case study on the music and sexuality in two films by João César Monteiro

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the music and its interactions in two films directed by João César Monteiro – Recordações da Casa Amarela [Recollections of the Yellow House] and A Comédia de Deus [God’s Comedy]. These are the first two films in God’s Trilogy, a trilogy released between 1989 and 1999. Together, they tell the story of a character called João de Deus, who lives and behaves in ways that deviate from social and moral norms, establishing obsessive and perverse relationships with several women. In this article, we approach the music and sounds we hear in certain scenes and the way these work in representing the character’s ‘self’. Thus, by analysing the music that accompanies the voyeuristic behaviour of the character João de Deus towards Julieta, his sexual overvaluation of Rosarinho, and the fetishism evidenced in his relationship with Joaninha’s underwear, we can both better define the main character’s personality and understand the role music plays in developing the plots of Monteiro’s cinema.

KEYWORDS:

• God’s trilogy
• João César Monteiro
• sexual fantasies
• film music
• music and sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. During Monteiro’s early years as a film director, Portugal was under a dictatorship and censorship significantly restrained production and distribution practices in filmmaking. Even after the revolution in 1974, Portuguese directors struggled to obtain public funding for their films, and with private producers facing substantial difficulties in recouping their investments, particularly in ‘auteur cinema’ due to the dominance of Hollywood films in Portuguese cinemas and the limited success of such cinema among Portuguese audiences at that time. However, institutions such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, operating through the CPC (Portuguese Cinema Centre), and later the state-run IPC (Portuguese Cinema Institute), played a crucial role in funding films that would never manage to achieve profitability in Portugal (for more information on this matter, see Cunha 2018; Monteiro 1995).

2. This term is commonly used to refer to psychiatric hospitals in Portugal.

3. Luísa Jorge’s translation of Mort à crédit.

4. Violeta is Julieta’s mother and a repressive character who, according to Cunha (2010, 52), is a ‘recreation of the dictator who zealously and diligently runs his fief, watching over and controlling the deviations of his tenants’. This gesture by Violeta once again implies her strict control over João de Deus by restricting his ‘light privileges’ and consequently interrupting his moment of relaxation after his voyeuristic climax.

5. The film’s soundtrack has a guitar solo composed by Ry Cooder, based on the song ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’ written by Blind Willie Johnson.

6. This sound excerpt from Paris Texas comprises of snippets of dialogue (which mention the name of the film) and segments of the main musical theme. When João de Deus arrives at the house, he enters the living room where Violeta and other tenants are watching TV. Despite being off-screen, we see the light reflected on the characters and listen to the dialogue that at a certain point includes the words ‘Paris Texas’. João de Deus then goes to his room. When the door is closed, we can no longer hear the music of the film but when he opens it again to spy on Julieta, the musical theme is both heard and easily recognisable.

7. As Haute and Westerink (2020, 100) comment: ‘Whereas Eros and the pleasure principle push the individual to new objects, further development, and greater complexity, the (narcissistic) identification we are discussing here is more in line with the principle of inertia that Freud associates with the death drive’.

8. The sexual component of the relation between João de Deus and Rosarinho is noticeable in other scenes through the fetishization of Rosarinho’s hair and the sodomization act in the ice cream shop.

9. Joaninha says that she is 14 years old.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDP/00472/2020]; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDP/05021/2020]; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [2021.04853.BD]; Nova Instituto de Comunicação da NOVA; Instituto de Etnomusicologia - Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança (INET-md).