November has now rolled around.
The tourists are long gone from Costa da Caparica.
It’s a bright blue morning so I have a walk along the tiny narrow gauge railway which runs along the back of the wonderful beaches between Costa da Caparica and Fonte da Telha a few miles south down the coast.
The trains only run in peak season.
The sand-covered sleepers show that the track has been out of use for a few weeks.
This healthy invigorating sea air is great for clearing your head in the morning.
When my classes finish this evening I race up Avenida Heliodoro Salgado until I reach Cine Incrível, one of Almada’s three cinemas.
Incrível is a cavernous place with a dated appearance.
Its brown and yellow walls induce a slight queasiness in me.
The auditorium has wooden handrails, a wide stage and a good-sized screen way down below.
The BONG! BONG! BONG-BONG! sound announcing the imminent start of the film sets something shuddering in the ceiling. It feels like the roof is about to cave in.
My balcão seat ticket costs only 200 escudos, about seventy-five pence in British money.
Though glad that it is on, I can’t help wondering why Incrível is showing Sam Shepard’s quirky film Far North on a November Monday night in this distant suburb of Lisbon.
Only four people are here to see it, giving this large cinema the empty unreal feel that Hampden Park must have when Queen’s Park are playing at home.
The three main characters in ‘Far North’ are Uncle Dane (Donald Moffat), Bertrum (Charles Durning), and Kate (Jessica Lange).
Early on there is a terrific conversation between Kate and Bertrum, her Dad, in his hospital room. Their talk is dry and laconic, tinged with a madness which pervades the whole of the movie.
A marvellous soundtrack is provided by the Red Clay Ramblers.
Storming country fiddle accompanies a brilliant scene in which Bertrum and drunk old Uncle Dane set off along railroad tracks, first through industrial wasteland, next through some deserted sidings and then as night falls they make it to the countryside, emerging from birch forest as they walk across a river bridge silhouetted against a purple dusk sky under a full moon, benign lunatics in their element.
Kate, in a perfect performance of good-humoured restrained exasperation by Jessica Lange, is the prodigal daughter who has left her rural roots far behind in order to seek something more stimulating in the big city.
Returning home to comfort her Uncle Dane during his grouchy convalescence, Kate finds her mother dottier than ever, charmingly decades out of touch with reality, pining for the days when her household was full of hard-working menfolk of whom Dane and Bertrum are the only remnants.
There are echoes of Vladimir and Estragon in a drunken conversation between Dane and Bertrum in Bertrum’s hospital room overlooking the industrial port from which huge freighters slide out into Lake Superior.
The freighters’ sirens hoot as they depart, a doleful registering of time slipping aimlessly by.
Melancholy, warm, humorous and downbeat, ‘Far North’ is a perfect movie for a Monday night in November.
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