"...this small ache felt in the Portuguese way so tame as to be almost plant-like..." (Alexandre O'Neill) A very particular kind of beauty is expressed in the best of contemporary Portuguese cinema, and A Portuguese Farewell, a new film by João Botelho (Conversa Acabada, PFA 1/84) is a fine example of it--visually spare, graceful, yet painted in the most sumptuous of colors; emotionally powerful, the more so for being understated. Two stories reflect on each other. One (shot in black-and-white on color stock) is set in the dense jungles of Portuguese Africa in 1972. A lost detachment of soldiers fighting an invisible enemy becomes aware of defeat; a young boy is killed. In the second story--set in Portugal, in 1985, in color--a man and a woman have not recovered from the loss of their son in the colonial wars of a decade ago, which nobody speaks of now. They leave their village to visit their surviving offspring but the family meeting only reinforces "the great sorrow of all things falling apart into endless broken pieces" (Botelho). The Japanese master Ozu is Botelho's acknowledged mentor, and in these delicate scenes of disappointment and resignation, these brave, mute farewells, we see how this legacy expresses itself. Selected for The Museum of Modern Art's New Directors/New Films '86.