Alguma Coisa Assim

Depicting three phases of one relationship in an account of the life of contemporary cosmopolitan youth, Alguma Coisa Assim is a fresh and brisk drama that, with its non-traditional collage-like structure (combining events from three different years) and unforced work with parallels, shows how different situations are repeated in two people’s life together and, at the same time, change over time as both partners get to know each other better and have differing expectations of each other. It is a pity that the film is diminished by ornaments and techniques intended to make it special (slow motion, 360-degree camera rotation, machine-like symmetrical compositions), which draw attention away from the informal acting performances and the dialogue that equally takes into account the perspective of both the man and the woman and addresses, through individual stories, the more general problems of human sexuality (to which the professional focus of the partner involved in the research of infertility treatments is also tailored). The fact that the film was actually shot in three different time periods (2006, 2013, 2016) with the same actors portraying the characters is worthy of attention and, as in Boyhood and the Doinel tetralogy, gives it a para-documentary dimension and the transformation of the characters is thus more believable. Despite a certain unevenness, Alguma Coisa Assim is, on the whole, a narratively original work and in addressing the problems that people deal with in relationships over time, it is a relatively accurate millennial relationship film. 75% (21.10.2018)