Conserva Acabada. 1990. Portugal. Written and directed by João César Monteiro. With Monteiro, Alexandra Lencastre. DCP. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 12 min.
The Ladies Man. 1961. USA. Directed by Jerry Lewis. Screenplay by Lewis, Bill Richmond. With Lewis, Helen Traubel, Pat Stanley, Kathleen Freeman. 35mm. 95 min.
In his second film as a director, Jerry Lewis plays a single man who, after a recent breakup, finds a job that forces him to face his fear of women: a servant-buffoon in a female-only boarding house. The Ladies Man not only turned out to be a comic masterpiece, but its creative formal inventions in its doll-house interior (prolonged crane shots, an innovative use of video assist, among others) dazzled a new generation of European directors, including Jean-Luc Godard. In Conserva Acabada, a commission by Portuguese public television for a short film about the poet Fernando Pessoa, João César Monteiro employs his buffoon persona, as well as Heraclitus’s fragments, to satirize Portuguese cinema, its production methods, and the exploitation of cultural icons to create empty audiovisual projects for financial gain.