‘I Only Rest In The Storm’ review: Pedro Pinho visits neo-colonialism in Guinea-Bissau

Dir: Pedro Pinho. Portugal/France/Brazil/Romania. 2025. 211mins

A Portuguese environmental engineer tries to navigate the difficult waters of being a white man in West Africa in I Solely Relaxation within the Storm. Director Pedro Pinho, whose three-hour unemployment musical The Nothing Manufacturing facility received a bunch of pageant awards in 2017, has now made a 200-plus-minute characteristic set in Guinea-Bissau that feels impressively novelistic — if by no means fairly epic. Higher at exploring questions of neo-colonialism than sexual energy dynamics, this sweaty specialised merchandise, shot totally on 35mm and premiering in Cannes Un Sure Regard, ought to nonetheless enchantment to festivals and high-end arthouses.

Pinho’s curiosity in neo-colonial points is tackled with a lucid gaze 

We first meet bearded engineer Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) within the desert on what seems to be the tail finish of his automobile journey all the way in which from Portugal to Guinea-Bissau. He’s headed there to finish an environmental affect report a couple of deliberate highway by means of rice fields, left unfinished by Sérgio’s predecessor who has mysteriously vanished. 

Sérgio shortly falls in with two individuals who additionally occur to be finest associates: Diára (Cleo Diára), a fierce native girl, and Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), a free-spirited, queer Brazilian man. Collectively, they run a bar within the nominally Portuguese-speaking nation. To elucidate the distinction between Sérgio and himself, Gui suggests: “He colonised, I used to be colonised.” Pinho takes that concept actually as nicely, as Sérgio has the hots for Gui and initiates a kiss at a celebration – even when Sergio isn’t fairly certain how his whiteness makes Gui, who identifies as Black, really feel. However whether or not that kiss is the start of one thing extra turns into the thing of a wager between Diára and Gui about their newfound white pal, who’s unaware he’s grow to be a pawn of their recreation.  

I Solely Relaxation In The Storm joins a cohort of Portuguese movies – together with Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Ivo Ferreira’s Letters From Struggle and João Nuno Pinto’s Mosquito  – that try to untangle the nation’s advanced relationship with its colonial historical past. Whereas these had been all interval movies (even when Gomes took a postmodern method to interval), Pinho’s movie is about within the current. This implies it’s centered extra on neo-colonialism, with Sérgio a white Portuguese man in a former Portuguese colony who holds numerous energy: his report can both begin or derail building on vital public works. 

As performed by Coragem, Sérgio isn’t — or reasonably, doesn’t attempt to be — too conscious of his relative significance, treating his duties as only a job and sometimes presenting himself as a milquetoast character. However the truth that his (white) predecessor disappeared in mysterious circumstances is rarely removed from Sérgio’s thoughts. He clearly wonders about whether or not he’ll find yourself like his now-vanished colleague and what, if something, may need been the latter’s fake pas in a rustic during which Sérgio doesn’t know any of the native energy gamers — or does he?  

Pinho’s curiosity in neo-colonial points is tackled with a lucid gaze and applicable room for native views. Sure, this can be a movie with a white protagonist in Africa however Diára and Gui’s points-of-view are a crucial a part of the screenplay (credited to the director and eight others). Concepts and themes come up primarily from conversations and conditions that really feel pure reasonably than preachy or educational, with a late, fiery dialog with Diára in a automobile being particularly highly effective.  

Certainly, enhancing, credited to Pinho and three others, does a exceptional job of making an involving human story full of socio-political and historic undercurrents, no less than for the movie’s first three hours (over the past 30-odd minutes, the protagonist and movie appear considerably misplaced). 

One factor that complicates issues on the bottom — or, reasonably, in mattress — is Sérgio’s love life. If a white particular person has intercourse with a non-white particular person in a saga about neo-colonialism, it turns into practically inconceivable to not learn one thing metaphorical into the act. However Pinho’s intercourse scenes, a few of them reasonably specific, play out on a extra advanced, much less predictable – and at instances much less understandable – degree than the final socio-political scenario and its apparent imbalances, so drawing any direct parallels between the movie’s sexual and thematic planes is sophisticated. Sérgio’s adventurous intercourse life would possibly make the story extra particular person and up to date, but it surely additionally renders the movie’s final message much less apparent.