Past and Present

Vanda is a young widow. She has more than one marriage behind her. She puts her dead husbands on a pedestal. The living one she belittles and betrays. The film is set in a large country house. It opens with friends arriving to console the widow. The house is crowded and everyone there has an angle. At one point the widow goes upstairs. She meets her husband there. He confronts her with accusations about the past. That scene and others like it expose the people in the house. Small calculations, self interest and romantic appetites all come out. The film looks at the leisured class in Portugal and is remembered as a social satire. It is adapted from a play by Vicente Sanches. Maria de Saisset and Manuela de Freitas appear in the hundred and fifteen minute film, a Portuguese production Manoel de Oliveira finished in 1972.