what's it like?

This film is a perplexing film narrative of Portuguese history. It's not perplexing because it's about the disasters of that history (although that should be interesting enough), but because of the way Oliveira films it, in his usual slow (although not the slowest) and ragged way. We have to know, however, that he's really a Romantic, in that he mixes actual history with fiction -- Vasco da Gama, for example, visits Camões' Isle of Love as if it actually existed in history -- not because it's unusual or strange, but precisely because that is how the Portuguese see their own history, i. e., as myth. He is also belatedly Romantic in the way in which the film adopts Sebastianism (a messianic ideology) as the thread that gives strucuture to the narrative. The battle of Alcazar-el-Kebir (1578) has got some of the spectacular fire, say, of Kurosawa's battles, except that Oliveira cannot resist introducing the clownesque and bathos even in the gravest moments. Still, this film is not one of the best examples of his irony: in the matter of national History (again, as a Romantic), Oliveira is too enmeshed in myth to be able to laugh about it. Watch this if you want to know how a certain generation of educated Portuguese people see themselves, or if you want to know more about Oliveira's filmography.