Shooting dates: March 1972, October 1973, finished in 1974
Archive footage: Cinemateca Nacional, Emissora Nacional
Film extracts: A Revolução de Maio, Chaimite
Format: 35mm
Genre: fiction (social drama)
Duration: 72’
Length: 1978 meters
Distributor: Marfilmes (currently), Filmes Castello Lopes (on release date)
Release date: Cinema Londres, in Lisbon, on September 18, 1975
International English Titles: Gentle Costume, Gentle Morals, Mild Manners
Synopsis
A portrait of the everyday life of a typical middle-class family in parallel with the fall of the Estado Novo, the 48-year dictatorship led by Salazar.[2] The daughters' conflicts and frustrations with their parents, their grandmother and their maid find an obvious echo in the country's collective events. The Carnation Revolution is about to explode.
Historical context
As a rupturing film, Brandos Costumes is less identifiable by the presence of avant-garde aesthetics or an agile plot with a daring structure - not like Belarmino, by Fernando Lopes or O Cerco, by António da Cunha Telles - than by its ideological left-wing posture, taking a portrait of the social classes, and by its social and political sense of critic.
Some characteristics of the new generation films, revolted with the state of things and motivated to denounce the social injustices, are clearly present in Brandos Costumes. The theatrical tone of the representation of this work let it be integrated in the tradition that Manoel de Oliveira (O Passado e o Presente - 1971) explores.[citation needed]
^de España, Rafael (2013). "Portugal". In Aitken, Ian (ed.). The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Routledge. p. 737. ISBN9780415596428.
^Luhr, William (1987). World Cinema Since 1945. Ungar. p. 496. ISBN9780804430784.