Whenever he spoke about O Cerco (1970), António da Cunha Telles liked to remind people that, following its Lisbon premiere, the film sold out for three months in a row, with three screenings a day. What could this box office success be attributed to? To begin with, several earlier successes. Months before, O Cerco had been selected for Critics’ Week at Cannes, and it had received a glowing reception from the international press. The leading actor, Maria Cabral, had left a strong impression, which led many to recognise in her the charisma of an emerging star. Cunha Telles recalled all of this with evident pleasure, likely because the significant recognition received by the film, contrasted entirely with the difficult conditions in which it had been made. As a producer of New Portuguese Cinema, he was struggling with a picture of imminent bankruptcy, and the resources available were scarce. Starting with the 20,000 metres of out-of-date film used for shooting. But, as the director also recalled in several interviews and statements, O Cerco was born under an auspicious star, and everything seemed to conspire for it to succeed. Even the bad condition of the film stock, which resulted in a low-contrast picture, not only accentuated Maria Cabral’s enigmatic beauty but also conferred a softer light on the shooting locations in Lisbon.

Today it seems clear that, despite all of this, there was something more, though indefinable, determining the success of this film in which a young, divorced woman searches for a life of her own, while at the same time she is fenced in, and at times violated, by a working routine entirely tailored to men’s desires. As Marta enters into the world of advertising agencies, we see the fences being built around her by men for whom feminine beauty is essentially transactional and consumable. Marta’s work at the agency is based on the exploitation of her captivating sensuality. “We need the buyer to desire you first of all… and then the whisky, you see?” — so says her advertising friend, justifying why Marta needs to be unclothed as she is photographed holding a whisky bottle close to her face.

In this almost exclusively male world, openly governed by machismo, Marta’s desire for autonomy and individual freedom is easily reduced to a sexual plane. As someone capable of subliminally eliciting desire and associating that desire with the acquisition of certain consumable goods, Marta risks becoming, herself, consumable. At least, that is how she is viewed by the advertising men around her.

Now, where Cunha Telles’s film — itself, ironically, full of indirect advertising in order to offset its production costs — is fascinating is in the fact that, as well as the glaring inequality between the sexes, the director allows us to glimpse an ongoing disconnect, an anomaly in the way in which the female protagonist lives in her time. Interacting with the men who surround her, Marta makes them (and us) feel her passive resistance. The freedom she seeks is certainly not what they imagine for her, nor is it the relative autonomy they consent to give her. Perhaps the box office success of O Cerco, in 1970, derived also from this, since the interior world that emerges between Marta’s fleeting gestures of resistance and affirmation already, at that time, no longer coincided with the role attributed to her by the male characters. Through this disconnect, this anomaly, what we glimpse in this film is the end of an era, or the desire for that end. Certainly Maria Cabral’s charisma, the contemporary relevance of the script, the eroticism of certain scenes, the shooting process, the melancholic music by António Victorino d’Almeida, the beautiful cinematography — all of this counted towards the film’s success. But the cinemagoers who flocked to the auditoriums in 1970 must surely also have sensed that this paralysing time, in which Marta wanders in concentric circles around Lisbon, heralded the end of a state of things. O Cerco was shot in 1969, already under the liberating influence of May 1968. Twice in the film, the inability of men to deal with female eroticism, in contexts apparently consented to by Marta, leads to physical violence. Marta is not merely an object of male In this almost exclusively male world, openly governed by machismo, Marta’s desire for autonomy and individual freedom is easily reduced to a sexual plane. As someone capable of subliminally eliciting desire and associating that desire with the acquisition of certain consumable goods, Marta risks becoming, herself, consumable. At least, that is how she is viewed by the advertising men around her. Now, where Cunha Telles’s film — itself, ironically, full of indirect advertising in order to offset its production costs — is fascinating is in the fact that, as well as the glaring inequality between the sexes, the director allows us to glimpse an ongoing disconnect, an anomaly in the way in which the female protagonist lives in her time. Interacting with the men who surround her, Marta makes them (and us) feel her passive resistance. The freedom she seeks is certainly not what they imagine for her, nor is it the relative autonomy they consent to give her. Perhaps the box office success of O Cerco, in 1970, derived also from this, since the interior world that emerges between Marta’s fleeting gestures of resistance and affirmation already, at that time, no longer coincided with the role attributed to her by the male characters. Through this disconnect, this anomaly, what we glimpse in this film is the end of an era, or the desire for that end. Certainly Maria Cabral’s charisma, the contemporary relevance of the script, the eroticism of certain scenes, the shooting process, the melancholic music by António Victorino d’Almeida, the beautiful cinematography — all of this counted towards the film’s success. But the cinemagoers who flocked to the auditoriums in 1970 must surely also have sensed that this paralysing time, in which Marta wanders in concentric circles around Lisbon, heralded the end of a state of things. O Cerco was shot in 1969, already under the liberating influence of May 1968. Twice in the film, the inability of men to deal with female eroticism, in contexts apparently consented to by Marta, leads to physical violence. Marta is not merely an object of male desire, even if the advertising executives of consumer society see her as such. She belongs to another world, still emerging, in spite of the drabness of Portugal under Marcello Caetano. Soon after, in 1971, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa began to collaborate on writing the Novas Cartas Portuguesas, a book which, banned after three days in circulation, saw them in court accused of pornography and offenses to public decency, while also gaining them significant international support. In 1972, Luiza Neto Jorge and Jorge Martins published O Ciclópico Acto, a dizzying artist’s-poem-book in which the celebration of the erotic presence of the body was contrasted with an ironic vision of remote seafaring conquests. The world was changing. And this change goes hand-in-hand with the circular time in which Marta searches for her escape.