‘Bad Living’ (‘Mal Viver’) Review: A Miserable Melodrama of Female Cruelty

Portuguese auteur Joao Canijo (Blood of My Blood) arrives at the 2023 Berlinale with not just one but two films — a diptych shot in the same hotel location with overlapping characters. Bad Living (Mal Viver) focuses largely on the women who own and run the hotel, while its companion, Living Bad (Viver Mal), centers on some of the hotel’s guests. (Both films unfold within the same time frame.) Full disclosure: I have not seen Living Bad, but given that Bad Living was selected for the festival’s main competition presumably it was deemed to be the stronger work. One can only shudder to imagine what an ordeal Living Bad must be to endure. Punishingly slow, grandiloquently depressing and ultimately not even especially convincing psychologically, Bad Living feels like the work of people who sincerely believed they were making great art. Sadly, they were mistaken.  

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Bad Living assembles a procession of mostly static, minutes-long shots that are now universal cinematic shorthand for solemn self-seriousness. That goes hand in hand with a few other arthouse mannerisms deployed here ad nauseum by cinematographer Leonor Teles: filmed reflections in mirrors and windows, dollhouse long shots wherein characters can be seen in several rooms at once (not so hard to do with a hotel setting), and deliberately off-kilter, oblique compositions that only show a bit of an actor at a time.

There are also lashings of shallow focus so that some faces in group scenes are blurry but others so scrutinized you can count the pores. Likewise, the dialogue is mixed so that several conversations overlap, which Canijo likens to the experience of being in a café and having the ability to eavesdrop on several tables at once. It’s probably more effective if you speak fluent Portuguese, but the experience is a bit hellish for those using subtitles.

Not that the dialogue, devised over extensive periods of rehearsal by the cast and Canijo (Living Bad, by way of contrast, offers adaptations of some plays by August Strindberg), comes across all that well. Swerving between banal chatter and scathing excoriations, the characters here have no capacity for meaningful but non-corrosive conversation.

At the heart of the story are three women, a matryoshka of bitterness, resentment and spite. Sara (Rita Blanco) is the matriarch, the formidable owner of the hotel itself (a rather attractive structure located outside Oporto in Northern Portugal). She is mother to Piedade (Anabela Moreira), a middle-aged divorced woman said to be possibly bipolar or clinically depressed who can do no right in her mother’s eyes. Throughout, Sara tears strips off Piedade, critiquing her mothering skills, her clothes, her body shape, you name it. Piedade is herself a mother to Salome (Madalena Almeida), a young woman not yet out of college who has spent most of her childhood living with her father (never seen here) because Piedade effectively sent her away, perhaps afraid that she wouldn’t be able to love her. That resulted, with circular logic, in Salome feeling permanently unloved, so naturally she’s chosen to come home to this house of mean mothers in the wake of her father’s recent death.    

In addition to this triad of misery, also in residence are housekeeper-chef-nursemaid Angela (Vera Barreto), who seems to be in a relationship with waitress Raquel (Cleia Almeida), another member of the family perhaps but it’s hard to be sure with all the dialogue overlapping as it does. Unfortunately for Angela, Raquel likes to have sex with the male guests, which is awkward. At least Raquel appears to be the only person in the film who has any ability to laugh and enjoy pleasure.

Over a torpidly paced two-and-a-bit hours, the various women grouse, bicker, scream, mope and beat each other, wandering from bedroom to bedroom in the night in swimsuits and skimpy nighties. Piedade also swims a lot in the hotel’s luscious-looking pool, the one place she seems sort of happy and which she protects fiercely lest anyone else dare to get in without a swim cap.

Sometimes a cutaway to a TV set reveals that her watching the Portuguese version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or Joao Cesar Monteiro’s God’s Comedy (1995). Viewers may feel a pang of envy that they too could be watching either of those entertainments, in which people are not relentlessly cruel to each other all the time.