‘I Only Rest In The Storm’ review: Pedro Pinho visits neo-colonialism in Guinea-Bissau

Dir: Pedro Pinho. Portugal/France/Brazil/Romania. 2025. 211mins

A Portuguese environmental engineer tries to navigate the difficult waters of being a white man in West Africa in I Solely Relaxation within the Storm. Director Pedro Pinho, whose three-hour unemployment musical The Nothing Manufacturing unit gained a bunch of competition awards in 2017, has now made a 200-plus-minute characteristic set in Guinea-Bissau that feels impressively novelistic — if by no means fairly epic. Higher at exploring questions of neo-colonialism than sexual energy dynamics, this sweaty specialised merchandise, shot totally on 35mm and premiering in Cannes Un Sure Regard, ought to nonetheless enchantment to festivals and high-end arthouses.

Pinho’s curiosity in neo-colonial points is tackled with a lucid gaze 

We first meet bearded engineer Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) within the desert on what seems to be the tail finish of his automotive journey all the way in which from Portugal to Guinea-Bissau. He’s headed there to finish an environmental influence report a few deliberate street by means of rice fields, left unfinished by Sérgio’s predecessor who has mysteriously vanished. 

Sérgio rapidly falls in with two individuals who additionally occur to be finest mates: Diára (Cleo Diára), a fierce native lady, and Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), a free-spirited, queer Brazilian man. Collectively, they run a bar within the nominally Portuguese-speaking nation. To clarify the distinction between Sérgio and himself, Gui suggests: “He colonised, I used to be colonised.” Pinho takes that concept actually as nicely, as Sérgio has the hots for Gui and initiates a kiss at a celebration – even when Sergio isn’t fairly certain how his whiteness makes Gui, who identifies as Black, really feel. However whether or not that kiss is the start of one thing extra turns into the article of a wager between Diára and Gui about their newfound white pal, who’s unaware he’s change into a pawn of their sport.  

I Solely Relaxation In The Storm joins a cohort of Portuguese movies – together with Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Ivo Ferreira’s Letters From Conflict and João Nuno Pinto’s Mosquito  – that try and untangle the nation’s complicated relationship with its colonial historical past. Whereas these have been all interval movies (even when Gomes took a postmodern method to interval), Pinho’s movie is ready within the current. This implies it’s targeted extra on neo-colonialism, with Sérgio a white Portuguese man in a former Portuguese colony who holds a number of energy: his report can both begin or derail development on necessary public works. 

As performed by Coragem, Sérgio isn’t — or relatively, doesn’t attempt to be — too conscious of his relative significance, treating his duties as only a job and sometimes presenting himself as a milquetoast character. However the truth that his (white) predecessor disappeared in mysterious circumstances is rarely removed from Sérgio’s thoughts. He clearly wonders about whether or not he’ll find yourself like his now-vanished colleague and what, if something, might need been the latter’s fake pas in a rustic through which Sérgio doesn’t know any of the native energy gamers — or does he?  

Pinho’s curiosity in neo-colonial points is tackled with a lucid gaze and applicable room for native views. Sure, this can be a movie with a white protagonist in Africa however Diára and Gui’s points-of-view are a mandatory a part of the screenplay (credited to the director and eight others). Concepts and themes come up primarily from conversations and conditions that really feel pure relatively than preachy or educational, with a late, fiery dialog with Diára in a automotive being particularly highly effective.  

Certainly, modifying, credited to Pinho and three others, does a exceptional job of making an involving human story filled with socio-political and historic undercurrents, no less than for the movie’s first three hours (over the past 30-odd minutes, the protagonist and movie appear considerably misplaced). 

One factor that complicates issues on the bottom — or, relatively, in mattress — is Sérgio’s love life. If a white individual has intercourse with a non-white individual in a saga about neo-colonialism, it turns into practically not possible to not learn one thing metaphorical into the act. However Pinho’s intercourse scenes, a few of them relatively express, play out on a extra complicated, much less predictable – and at instances much less understandable – stage than the overall socio-political state of affairs and its apparent imbalances, so drawing any direct parallels between the movie’s sexual and thematic planes is difficult. Sérgio’s adventurous intercourse life would possibly make the story extra particular person and modern, nevertheless it additionally renders the movie’s final message much less apparent.