Berlinale 2023: Bad Living
It is a quiet day in a remote hotel in Northern Portugal. The careful balance between the women who own it and work there is on the verge of collapse. The unexpected arrival of Salomé (Madalena Almeida), daughter of Piedade (Anabela Moreira), brings back old wounds and painful memories that will change the lives of these ladies.
As its title may suggest, Mal Viver (which translates to Bad Living) is a film all about unease and depression. The decadent hotel reflects the state of mind of the characters, slowly decaying and lacking the warm, frequent clientele of yesteryear. This location is a limbo, a microcosm of the world where all the worst tendencies of humanity are on display: family members talk badly behind each other’s backs, lovers are not afraid to have a quick affair with a guest, and venomous words of ungratefulness are freely spouted without shame.
The heart of this drama by João Canijo is the relationship between Piedade and Salomé. Anabela Moreira delivers one of the strongest performances at this year’s Berlinale, for the masterfully captures the complex psychology of Piedade: a woman suffering from depression, alone despite being surrounded by friends and family, preferring the company of her dog to that of humans. She has destroyed many bridges over the years, yet she seems oblivious to that. When the grandmother and matriarch of the family Sara (Rita Blanco) shelters Salomé, this sends Piedade down a dangerous spiral of memories, regrets, and longing that make for some of the tensest melodramatic scenes of the past couple of years.
What helps make Mal Viver such a melancholic and anxious watch is the cinematography by Leonor Teles. The shot composition is absolutely immaculate, employing decade-old techniques of wide-angle shots and static images to create impressive tableaux vivants that cleverly play with framing. Characters are often covered by drapes, windows, and other elements of the hotel, further emphasizing the rift between these women. Those gorgeous vistas are contrasted by tight, claustrophobic close-ups that focus on the legs, arms, and faces of these people. It makes for a texturally rich experience that makes the audience lose themselves in the drama at hand.
While Mal Viver could easily feel like a one-note psychological drama, it is the subtlety of the performances and moving screenplay that makes this a much more universal watch than one might first think. It is an exploration of the nature of existence, and what it means to be alive and feel emotions when everything seems hopeless and pointless. This is a potentially triggering experience for viewers suffering from depression, as the level of intensity and drama of the last act is deeply upsetting when all the bitterness and resentfulness that has been building up in these characters for decades becomes unleashed. Mal Viver ends up being one of the standout films of this year’s competition, as well as one of the best stealth-Covid films: being stuck inside a confined place with loved ones has led to pent-up frustration exploding in violent ways in many households, and Canijo replicates this feeling to great dramatic effect.