The King's Body

In O Corpo de Afonso, João Pedro Rodrigues launches a brilliant and idiosyncratic inquiry into Portugal's centuries-old fascination with the country's first king, Afonso Henriques, stories of whose purportedly gigantic body and colossal sword have provided ready-made iconography for generations of later rulers. (Salazar himself adopted Afonso's mythic image as a key ideological prop for his regime.) Enlisting a group of musclemen, employing stripped-down (pun intended) means, combining contorted figures with lurid colours worthy of Ingres and evoking issues of class and sexuality along the way, Rodrigues brings new meaning to the term "cinematic corpus" in his attempt to find a fresh form for this national myth at a critical juncture in the country's present. ANDRÉA PICARD