“João Canijo really loves actors… he’s really listening”: At the press conference for Mal Viver (Bad Living)

Premiering in competition at the 2023 Berlinale, director João Canijo’s Mal Viver has received a critical response that can politely be described as mixed. The restrained film, depicting different generations of women who run a boutique hotel, screened alongside its companion piece, Viver Mal (Living Badly), which pivots around the hotel’s guests, and was selected for the festival’s Panorama section. The director and his cast talked to the press ahead of the film’s red carpet premiere.  

Unsurprisingly, the director was quizzed about why he decided to simultaneously make two companion films, and if that had been the plan from the start. “Not really,” said the acclaimed Portuguese director. “The starting point was doing something about anxiety in an empty hotel. But, shortly afterwards, we understood what the film would gain if the hotel had clients. And from the moment the hotel had clients it was clear it was two films.”

The hotel that hosts the entirety of the action is, to use an overused observation, practically a character too. When asked about the modernist seaside hotel in Portugal’s Fao province, it turned out that the location was a nostalgic one for the director: “It’s a very special hotel, and it was a hotel that I attended with my parents in my childhood. So I remembered it.” Canijo continued, “But I was a bit afraid that it was destroyed, and not the same anymore. But it happens that it’s travelling in time, and the hotel is exactly the same as it was at the end of the 60s.”

Rita Blanco, who plays family matriarch Sara, commented on the director’s protracted rehearsal methods, in which he collaborates with the cast to create the screenplay: “It’s very special work because we’re working on the writing – on our characters – with him. So it gives us a very big space, of liberty, of freedom, for us to work. And not every director does that, and it’s good; for me it’s good.”

According to the director, this collaborative approach took time: “The rehearsals were long before the shoot. Long sessions for some months, with each group of each film. And everything was recorded – filmed, actually – and from the recordings of the rehearsal sessions, little by little we built the script.”

Anabela Moreira, who plays troubled adult daughter Piedade, attempted to explain the process and why it works: “I think that João Canijo really loves actors. I think he wanted to be an actor first, no? But he really loves us, and he has a way of driving us that is hard to explain. But imagine that we are working together and talking about the scenes and the characters, and then we start talking about our lives, and he’s listening to everything – he’s really listening. And then at a certain moment he gives you a text, and you get shocked because you see so much of yourself, and so much of her, and everything is mixed. And then it makes you make an interpretation of what your first thought was, and then you work on that interpretation so you go further in that, and it’s like… we get crazy.”

When asked about the mindset of his characters and the hostility they have for each other, the director pointed out that his film was essentially a story of oppressive parenting: “I don’t know if they’re mean by themselves. I think they’re victims of their anxiety. They can’t cope with life because they’re victims of themselves; so they become mean. But anyway, that’s me, that’s the truth for me. Mothers are mean. They can be mean because they live in such anxiety too, to properly love their daughters or sons, and they feel so much obligation to take the responsibility of that love that sometimes they just asphyxiate their daughters and their sons. And that was the story of Mal Viver.”

Oliver Johnston

Mal Viver (Bad Living) does not have a UK release date yet. Read our review here.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2023 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.

Watch the trailer for Mal Viver (Bad Living) here: