There are two parts, or three if you count the enigmatic prologue introducing us to a certain mysterious crocodile, which may or may not turn out to be the emblem or reincarnation of anguished love. In modern-day Lisbon, a devout middle-aged Catholic woman Pilar (Teresa Madruga) is concerned about her elderly neighbour, the fantastically cantankerous and imperious Aurora. She has to be driven home from the casino because she has blown every cent she has on slot machines. It is an addiction which she has inherited from her father, and Gomes shows us that, for all her confusion, the addiction has given her a lively, shrewd sense of life itself being a gamble. In the film’s next section, we flashback to Aurora's youth as a beautiful young woman living a kind of White Mischief existence in ’70s Portuguese Mozambique and falling in love with handsome adventurer Ventura (Carloto Cotta).
The film is in black and white, but this shift into the past is accompanied with a new aged-up graininess, a quasi-silent movie. There is no dialogue, but rather a narrative voiceover from the older Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo). It is a self-conscious conceit, but carried off elegantly. Gomes, if he wanted, could have made the Lisbon section in colour, and the mono-chrome shift would have been even more dramatic. But his concern is to be more subtle than that, a counterweight to the melodrama. It is not just about the transgression itself, but its muted buildup and low-key after effects (adapted from Peter Bradshaw’s review in The Guardian).
