A film director and producer meet a professional fortune teller to get information about the narrative of their next short film. Later they find themselves in a delicate situation, where the predictions about the film’s casting were quite right.
After a picaresque episode during the shooting of Palavra e Utopia (2000), in which a desperate actor left the set, Manoel de Oliveira imagined this situation’s counterpoint with the tender Je rentre à la maison (2001). Bruno Ferreira, in Nunca Mais É Demasiado Tempo, departs from a similar situation, but instead of dealing with the point of view of the actor who fails the shoot (“a film with Iris Cayatte” but without Iris Cayatte), he focuses on the team who, in the absence of a leading actress, tries to reinvent the film in the face of adversity. However, the film’s grace lies in its ambiguities. Where does the document of a dead-end finish and the staging of a game begin? By exposing all the seams, revealing the processes and inverting the narrative logics (at least in their appearance), Bruno Ferreira and Raquel da Silva (co-scriptwriter) transform the uncertainties of an embarrassment into a playful exercise on the weaving of cinema. To do this, they let themselves be led by the “holistic” abilities of a fortune teller who writes the film as it is assembled before our/their eyes. All doubts remain and only one certainty: destiny is a cursive art that lets itself be carried by the flood of (re)writing. – Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
