Francisca. 1981. Portugal. Directed by Manoel de Oliveira. Screenplay by Agustina Bessa-Luís, Oliveira. With Teresa Menezes, Diogo Dória, Mário Barroso, Manuela de Freitas, Teresa Madruga. In Portuguese; English subtitles. DCP. 166 min.
In 1980, New Directors/New Films audiences discovered the four-and-a-half-hour masterpiece Doomed Love, an adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco’s literary magnum opus by a “new” filmmaker who was then over 70 years old: Manoel de Oliveira. Remarkably, the Portuguese director would shoot over 40 films in his lifetime—a career followed closely by Adrienne Mancia, who organized the retrospective Manoel de Oliveira: Portugal’s Master Filmmaker in 1984, and a tribute at BAM for the director’s 100th birthday. Francisca, Oliveira’s follow-up to Doomed Love, is one of his greatest works, and united him with another Portuguese literary powerhouse—Agustina Bessa-Luís—in adapting her story about a desperate, obsessive, secretly perverse love triangle in Oporto’s 19th-century aristocratic milieu (in which Castelo Branco played a decisive role).