KVIFF 2025: The Luminous Life

The Luminous Life, the first full-length fiction film from 43-year-old Portuguese filmmaker João Rosas, is about one of the great subjects of cinema: being young, broke and heartbroken. It’s spring in Lisbon, and low-energy slacker Nicolau (Francisco Melo) is drifting through life and pining after his ex, Ines, who left the city a year ago. The film opens with him in a funk on his 24th birthday, and even the offer of a one-night stand from a coquettish French girl he meets at a bar can’t shake his stupor. But over the course of several more romantic imbroglios – a fling with a girl from Rome with a fascination for graveyards, an infatuation with a woman who’s religiously attending a retrospective at the Lisbon Cinemateca – Nicolau starts to find a spring in his step.

Rosas’s filmmaking style is as easy-going and charming as his lead character, with most of the film taking the form of sun-lit walking-and-talking scenes throughout Lisbon’s hippest corners, or drinks, dancing and philosophising at the city’s coolest bars. But this breezy portrait of youthful romance is far from lightweight. The economic precarity of young people is a clear subtextual thread running through the film, even before becoming textual when writer-director Rosas makes a wry cameo as a filmmaker who complains that a festival jury didn’t understand his recent movie about, you guessed it, the precarity of youth.

Many have already pointed out the influence of Eric Rohmer on Rosas’ filmmaking. The Luminous Life’s simple setup sprinkled with emotional complexity and criss-crossing romantic entanglements clearly owes much to the director of A Summer’s Tale and Claire’s Knee, but there’s perhaps another legendary Nouvelle Vague director in the mix too.

This isn’t Rosas’ first film concerned with the travails of Nicolau: that character’s growing pains also featured in Rosas' earlier short films Maria do Mar (2015) and Catavento (2020), which feature Melo when he was an adolescent and an older teen. This, of course, suggests an affinity with François Truffaut, who returned to his alter ego character Antoine Doinel (portrayed by Jean-Pierre Léaud) throughout his career. If Rosas continues to similarly drop us into Nicolau’s life every few years, I’d be happy to check in on his developments.

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The Luminous Life had its world premiere at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2025