Moral Order

In 1918 Maria Adelaide Coelho da Cunha left her home. She was the owner and heiress of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, and the world she lived in was the top of Portuguese society. The man she left with was the family chauffeur, a good deal younger than she was. The affair turned into a national scandal. Her family had her shut by force in an asylum and placed under legal guardianship. In 1920 she published parts of the diary she kept there, in a book titled Not Mad. She had to wait until 1944 to be declared of sound mind. The film tells the case not as a love story but as the way an order protects itself. Maria de Medeiros and Albano Jerónimo appear in Mário Barroso’s hundred and one minute Portuguese film, completed in 2020.