In the dingy Fontainhas slum of Lisbon, the occupants sleepwalk through impoverished lives. A depressed girl gives birth and abandons the infant to its deadbeat father. He doesn't know what to do with a child. A sympathetic nurse tries to help them out, but he seems incapable of understanding charity.
In the first of three movies about the occupants of the dead-end life, Pedro Costa shows us them doing..... very little about their situation. They don't talk. They don't seem to think. They barely react. Costa is clearly trying to force the audience into seeing them and understanding them, but it's hard to elicit sympathy for some one who doesn't seem self-aware enough to ask for anything. Is Costa, like Chantal Akerman, trying to impress on the audience the dreary dullness, the meaningless life of the truly impoverished? Possibly. Certainly I have the same reaction as to Akerman's works: if they don't care, why should I?
