Imagine you've been handed this massive budget
to make a sweeping historical war epic. Your
instinct is probably to show your country's greatest
victories. Oh, absolutely. The triumphant moments.
The ones that get put into school textbooks or
turned into statues in the town square. Exactly.
Those moments of undisputed glory. Well, today
we are taking a look at a piece of cinema that
took all of our historical sources and just completely
flipped that script. We're exploring a film...
where a director decided to focus entirely on
a nation's most devastating, crushing historical
defeats. Yeah, it is a radically different approach
to storytelling. Most nations, you know, they
build their cinematic and cultural myths around
winning. They forge their identities in the fire
of victory. But today, we are exploring a narrative
that builds its entire philosophical foundation
on losing and what that losing does to the collective
psyche of a country over centuries. Okay, let's
unpack this. The film we are looking at in this
deep dive is the 1990s cinematic masterpiece
called No, or The Vainglory of Command. And in
Portuguese, that translates to Known, von Gloria
de Mondar. Which is such a powerful title right
out of the gate. It really is. Before we get
into the dense historical weeds, let's lay out
the foundational facts from the stack of sources
we're looking at today. This film was directed
and edited by the legendary Portuguese filmmaker
Manuel de Oliveira. It was produced by Paulo
Branco, features some truly stunning atmospheric
cinematography by Elsa Roque, and clocks in at
a substantial 110 minutes. It actually premiered
out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
But looking past that pedigree behind the camera,
the real hook is the intense, almost haunting
way it structures its story. Yeah, the structure
is wild. What we're really doing in this deep
dive is exploring how Olivera synthesizes an
entire nation's history. He's taking these cyclical
historical failures and using them to explain
a very modern military crisis. He's essentially
asking this profound question of how the weight
of centuries of defeat crashes down. onto the
shoulders of just a single generation of soldiers.
Exactly. It demands that you look at history
not as a straight line of human progress, but
as a continuous repeating loop of human ambition
and, well, inevitable failure. To understand
that loop, we really have to start where the
film starts, which is in a very grim, very muddy
present. The year is 1974. It's early April.
and the scene opens in an ambiguous African territory.
Right. Our notes suggest it could be Portuguese
Guinea, Angola, or Mozambique. What we know for
certain is that we are right in the thick of
the Portuguese colonial war. This was a brutal
conflict that ran from 1961 to 1974. We were
riding in a transport truck, navigating through
a dense, unforgiving jungle, and were introduced
to a group of Portuguese soldiers. And that transport
truck is practically suffocating. You can feel
the physical and emotional exhaustion radiating
off these men. They're entirely drained. That
exhaustion makes total sense when you look at
who is leading them and the conversations they're
having. You meet the leader of this patrol, Lieutenant
Cabrita. Interestingly, he is a former history
student. which becomes the linchpin of the whole
narrative later on. Yeah, that detail is crucial.
You also meet his men, like Corporal Brito and
Soldier Manuel. And the mood among them isn't
just tired, it's this profound fatalism, total
disillusionment. They're heading toward a military
base to engage with liberation movement guerrillas,
but the soldiers themselves are constantly questioning
the entire purpose of their presence in this
war. They're essentially asking the Void, why
are we still here? I know the historical context
is crucial for us to understand this. Why were
these Pacific soldiers feeling so incredibly
hopeless by 1974? Well, if we connect this to
the bigger picture, that profound fatalism isn't
just a symptom of being tired and stationed in
a hostile jungle environment. It's a direct result
of incredible geopolitical isolation. The film
paints a very accurate, stark picture of Portugal
standing in the world at that specific historical
moment. These soldiers know that they aren't
just fighting local liberation guerrillas in
Africa. Their nation, back home, is facing opposition
and heavy criticism from virtually the entire
globe. It wasn't just a localized thing. Not
at all. You have the United States, the USSR,
China, the rest of Europe, and newly independent
African states. All of these global powers are
actively undermining and criticizing the Portuguese
colonial efforts. completely surrounded politically
speaking. Yes. The Cold War is raging, but both
sides agree that Portugal should not be clinging
to an empire. Portugal is standing entirely alone
on the world stage. That creates this unbelievable
pressure cooker of an environment. You have these
soldiers isolated geographically in the jungle,
isolated politically from the world and feeling
totally abandoned by history itself. And this
is where Lieutenant Cabrita, tapping into that
background as a history student you mentioned,
starts to philosophize. Right, he starts trying
to help his men make sense of their doomed reality.
And to do this, the film employs its most unique
narrative device. Cabrita starts launching into
these vivid historical flashbacks to explain
to his men why they are currently sitting in
the mud fighting a losing battle. It serves as
a brilliant framing mechanism. Cabrita is reaching
back into the deep past to find a vocabulary
for the pain and futility they're experiencing
in 1974. He's trying to give their suffering
context. I noticed in the notes that the casting
is highly unusual for these historical flashbacks.
The film uses the exact same actors to play the
modern soldiers in the 1974 jungle. and the warriors
in the ancient past. It's a fascinating choice.
Yeah. For example, the actor Luis Miguel Sintra
plays Lieutenant Caprita, but he also plays the
ancient leader Viriathus and later a figure named
Dom Schwamm. You have other actors too, like
Diogo Doria, Miguel Guilherme and Luis Lucas.
Exactly. They play these exhausted modern soldiers
and then seamlessly transition into the roles
of historical warriors in flashbacks. What is
Oliver trying to say by making that specific
theatrical choice? By casting the same faces
across centuries, Olivera creates a powerful
visual echo. He's telling you that this isn't
just a dry history lesson. This is a recurring
national nightmare. Wow. The modern soldier is
inextricably linked to the ancient warrior. They
are trapped in the exact same cycle, carrying
the same burdens. It strips away the illusion
that the past is distant or disconnected from
the present. Let's dive into that cycle. Cabrita
takes his men all the way back to antiquity for
the first flashback. We see the struggle of the
guerrilla leader Viriathus fighting against the
Roman invaders in Lusitania. And for some quick
context from our sources, Lusitania was an ancient
Roman province that roughly corresponds to modern
-day Portugal. Viriathus is portrayed as this
incredibly successful guerrilla leader, using
the terrain to outsmart the massive Roman military
machine. But despite his tactical brilliance,
it doesn't end in triumph. No, it doesn't. The
tragedy of Viriathus as the film frames it isn't
simply that he was eventually betrayed and assassinated.
It's a fundamental failure of vision. Viriathus
misses a crucial opportunity. He fails to capitalize
on the positive aspects of Roman civilization.
Rome brought administration, infrastructure,
and a broader worldview. But he rejects all of
that. Exactly. Because Viriathus rejects or fails
to integrate those advancements, focusing entirely
on resistance, he misses the chance to establish
a lasting unified kingdom for his people. The
lesson here isn't just about ancient Rome, is
it? It's a universal insight about adaptation.
It's about how the inability to synthesize opposing
ideas or the refusal to learn from your competitors
leads directly to your own downfall. That is
a perfect parallel. You see that same rigid mindset
destroying modern organizations or political
movements today. They fight so hard against an
opposing force that they refuse to absorb any
of its useful innovations. It's the first example
in the film of a victory slipping through their
fingers due to a lack of broader perspective.
It sets the thematic stage. And Cabrita doesn't
stop there. He keeps pulling his men through
the centuries. Flashbacks two and three deal
with a concept called the Iberian Union. This
was the recurring desperate dream of uniting
Portugal and Spain into a single unstoppable
continental powerhouse. A dream that never quite
worked out the way they wanted. Right. The second
flashback takes us to the year 1476, during the
Castilian War of Succession. This was a massive
dynastic conflict over who would rule the Crown
of Castile. We see the Portuguese King Afonso
suffer a crushing defeat at the Battle of Toro,
which violently prevents the unification of the
Iberian Peninsula. Why was this idea of union
such a recurring obsession for them? Uniting
with Spain was seen as a matter of ultimate survival
and relevance. Portugal, geographically, is backed
against the Atlantic Ocean, with Spain acting
as a massive wall between it and the rest of
Europe. So they felt trapped? Completely. If
they could unite the crowns, they wouldn't just
secure their borders. They would become the undisputed
masters of the globe. But the defeat at the Battle
of Toro crushes that military ambition. Ambition
meets brutal reality. To show that even peaceful
ambitions are cursed in this cycle, the third
flashback shows a later attempt at diplomatic
unification. This time, they try to unite Portugal
and Spain through a royal marriage between Afonso
of Portugal and Isabella of Spain. A purely diplomatic
solution. But even that peaceful route is instantly
thwarted. It's cut short by the sudden, entirely
unpredictable death of a young Portuguese prince
who was meant to inherit this unified empire.
Just defeat after defeat. If it isn't the sword,
it's fate stepping in to say no. It's a stark
reminder that forcing synergies, whether between
two 15th century kingdoms or two modern corporate
mega -mergers, often ends in unpredictable disaster.
This relentless recounting of failure serves
a very specific purpose for Cabrida's narrative.
He isn't just trying to depress his men further.
He is building a complex philosophical argument
about the nature of conquest itself. Here's where
it gets really interesting. The film transitions
from the marching and the intense historical
flashbacks to the soldiers finally setting up
camp for the night in the deep jungle. They are
sitting around the campfire, the darkness pressing
in on them. and Cabrita shares this profound
epiphany. It's a very striking scene. He argues
the territorial conquests, all these endless
battles for land, borders, and dominance are
entirely futile. It's an incredibly bold almost
subversive statement for a military commander
to make to his troops in the middle of a literal
war zone. He tells them that a nation's true
legacy isn't about what it takes from the world
through military force, but what it contributes
to humanity through discovery and knowledge.
It's a total philosophical rejection of the vain
glory of command that gives the film its title.
Cabrita is essentially telling his men that the
very thing they are fighting and dining for right
now, holding onto fading colonial territory,
is fundamentally meaningless in the grand sweep
of human history. The land will always be lost
eventually. To illustrate this pivot from taking
to contributing, the film gives us our fourth
flashback, and it is a massive, jarring shift
in tone. We move away from muddy battlefields
and into the legacy of Portuguese maritime exploration.
And Cabrita pulls this narrative directly from
the epic Portuguese poem, The Lusiads. Could
you give a little background on what the Lusiads
represents culturally before we dive into the
scene itself? The Lusiads is essentially the
foundational text of Portuguese literature. It
was written by Luz de Camoes in the 16th century.
You can think of it as Portugal's equivalent
to Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Aneed. So it's
deeply mythological. Exactly. It mythologizes
the real life voyages of Portuguese explorers,
elevating them to the level of classical gods
and heroes. It is the ultimate romanticized vision
of the nation's history. Olivera takes that romantic
vision and runs with it. We see the famous explorer
Vasco da Gama. But we don't just see him sailing
a wooden ship through rough seas. The film shifts
into pure mythology. We see his journey to the
mythical Isle of Love. Which is such a visual
departure from the rest of the film. Vasco da
Gama is aided by the classical goddess Venus,
played by Teresa Menezes. because of his great
deeds of exploration, his contributions to human
discovery, mapping the unknown world. He is rewarded
by beautiful nymphs on this lush island. And
he is then shown the cosmic harmony of the entire
world by the goddess Thetis, played by Leonor
Silvera. It is lush, it is beautiful, it is deeply
poetic. It really is. You have to appreciate
the staggering contrast that Olivera is building
here. On one side of the cinematic ledger, you
have the brutal, muddy tense and politically
isolated reality of a 1970s jungle ambush. The
soldiers are dirty, terrified and fighting a
war they fundamentally do not believe in. And
on the other side? On the other side, you have
the utopian mythological beauty of cosmic harmony
and divine reward on the Isle of Love. Oliver
is directly juxtaposing the ugly, violent reality
of trying to hold on to an empire with the beautiful,
romanticized myths that empires constantly tell
themselves to justify their own existence. It
is a psychological coping mechanism. It reminds
me of how people build mental utopias or engage
in intense escapism when their real -world environment
becomes unbearable. Cabrita is showing them the
poetry they are capable of while they sit waist
-deep in the mud. But the campfire eventually
burns down. Yeah, the night deepens and the conversation
turns to something far darker and more dangerous.
The soldiers start discussing this historical
concept called the Fifth Empire. The Fifth Empire
is a fascinating concept. This was a utopian
vision. heavily championed by a 17th century
Jesuit priest named Antonio Vieira. The idea
was to create a harmonious global Catholic world
empire, led of course by Portugal. And this vision
was aggressively, almost fanatically, pursued
by King Dom Sebastião, who's played in the film
by Matheus Lorena. What's fascinating here is
that the concept of the Fifth Empire represents
the ultimate pinnacle of hubris. It's the absolute
belief that your specific nation is destined
by God or by fate to rule and harmonize the entire
world. It's a dangerous mindset. Incredibly dangerous.
When a leader believes they have divine right
or historical inevitability on their side, they
lose all sense of caution. They walk blindly
into disaster because they believe failure is
cosmically impossible. It's the historical equivalent
of a modern startup CEO who completely ignores
all market research, burns through all their
capital, and alienates their staff because they
are absolutely convinced they are a visionary
destined to change the world. That's a great
analogy. They march their company straight off
a cliff because they are blinded by their own
internal myth. And marching off a cliff is exactly
what happens in the fifth and most catastrophic
flashback. Cabrucha recounts the ill -fated Battle
of Alcacer -Cubierre in the year 1578. A truly
disastrous moment. Dom Sebastian, chasing this
divine fifth empire dream, leads an army across
the sea into North Africa. But it's not a unified,
disciplined force. It's a diverse, incredibly
disorganized army of mercenaries and nobles.
They march straight into a complete and utter
massacre. It's a disaster of epic proportions
that wipes out a huge portion of the Portuguese
nobility in a single afternoon. And what's fascinating
here is the psychological fallout of this specific
battle on the broader national consciousness.
It was much more than just a devastating military
loss. Dom Sebastian, the young king, was killed
in the chaos, but his body was never recovered
from the battlefield. He just vanished into the
dust of the massacre. Precisely. And because
there was no body to mourn, there was no finality
to the death. Because the trauma was so absolute,
Dom Sebastian transformed from a dead king into
a ghostly symbol of salvation. Which sparked
a whole movement. Yes. This gave birth to a massive,
enduring cultural phenomenon known as Sebastianism.
It was the mystical belief that the fallen king
wasn't really dead and that he would one day
return through the morning fog to save the nation
in its darkest hour. It's a profound, tragic
form of historical denial. Instead of accepting
a devastating defeat, doing the hard work of
rebuilding and moving on, the entire culture
clung to a ghost. You see echoes of that today
in modern cultural phenomena, where massive groups
of people refuse to accept a political loss or
a societal shift. Instead of facing a painful
reality, they cling to wild conspiracies or myths
that a savior feeder will return to set everything
right. It's human nature to choose a comforting
ghost over a painful truth. And that specific
ghost haunts our soldiers right up until the
present moment in the film. Because Olivera suddenly
rips us out of the 16th century and throws us
violently back into the reality of 1974. The
transition is so abrupt. Morning breaks over
the jungle camp. The tense waiting is over. The
soldiers are ambushed by the guerrillas they
were sent to fight. In the ensuing chaos of the
firefight, Lieutenant Cabrita is our narrator,
our historian, our philosopher, is seriously
wounded. The brutal reality of the colonial war
finally catches up to the lofty intellectual
discussions of the night before. He's evacuated,
airlifted out of the jungle to a military hospital.
This is where the film reaches its absolute climax
and Oliveria completely blurs the lines between
past and present. They give Cabrita morphine
for the agonizing pain and he slips into this
intense, surreal delirium. In his mind, he's
no longer lying in a sterile 1970s hospital bed.
Right. He imagines himself transported back to
that horrific 1578 battle of Al -Qasr -Khrubir,
envisioning himself as the historical figure
Dom Joao, wandering through the aftermath of
the massacre. The boundaries of time just completely
dissolve in this sequence. The cyclical nature
of history that Cabrita has been lecturing his
men about finally literally consumes him. It
is a haunting, unforgettable sequence. While
wandering through this hallucinated, corpse -strewn
battlefield, Cabrita encounters a wounded knight,
played by the great Portuguese actor, Rudy Carvalho.
His performance here is incredible. It really
anchors the scene. This knight delivers a despairing,
soul -crushing monologue about the word non,
the word no. The night explains that no symbolizes
the ultimate destruction of hope. It's the absolute
end of ambition, the final unyielding wall that
human endeavor inevitably crashes against. And
then, after delivering this agonizing speech
about the futility of it all, the wounded knight
kills himself right there on the battlefield.
It's so dark. It is the ultimate expression of
the film's title. The vain glory of command always
inevitably meets the word no. It meets the absolute
limit of what is militarily and humanly possible.
The night's suicide represents the death of the
imperial dream itself. The realization that pushing
beyond that no only brings destruction. The imagery
gets even more surreal and poetic as Cabrida
lies dying in the hospital ward. In his morphine
delirium, he sees the spectral figure of Dom
Sebastian, the ghost king of the fifth empire
himself. The visual of this is chilling. The
ghost is squeezing a sword so tightly. that blood
begins to drip from the tip of the blade. It's
this incredibly dark poetic link connecting the
massive bloodshed of 1578 directly to Cabrita's
own bleeding broken body in 1974. The past is
literally bleeding into the present soaking into
his hospital sheets. A brilliant visual metaphor.
So what does this all mean? We have gone from
Roman invaders in Lusitania to muddy African
jungles to mythological islands of cosmic harmony
to bleeding ghosts. How does Olivera tie this
incredibly dense, century -spanning journey together
in the end? He ties it together with a stunning
piece of historical irony. The film reveals that
Cabrita succumbs to his wounds and dies in that
hospital bed on a very specific date, April 25th,
1974. The timing of that is incredible. For those
who might not be intimately familiar with 20th
century European history, April 25th, 1974 is
the exact date of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution.
The revolution that changed everything. Exactly.
This was a largely bloodless military coup organized
by exhausted, disillusioned military officers,
much like Cabrita and his men, that overthrew
the authoritarian regime back in Lisbon. It effectively
ended the very colonial war that Cabrito was
fighting and dying in. He dies on the exact day
that the war itself dies. Yes. The centuries
-long cycle of imperial defeat that he was so
obsessed with ends precisely as his own life
ends. He becomes the final casualty of a vainglory
that was expiring on that very day. As that profound
realization sets in for the audience, the film
closes, the credits begin to roll, and we hear
a song adapted from the Louisiana playing over
it all. It is a final, melancholic nod to the
poetry of a nation that spent centuries chasing
after impossible, destructive empires. It's a
masterful, deeply emotional ending that perfectly
synthesizes the historical macrocosm with the
personal microcosm of one soldier's life. As
we wrap up this deep dive into our sources, it's
worth taking a moment to just sit with what Manuel
de Oliveira accomplished here. This film is a
masterclass in connecting the deep past with
the immediate present. Without a doubt. It reminds
us that history isn't just a dry list of dates,
treaties, and battles that we've memorized for
high school tests. It's a living, breathing cycle
of human ambition, blinding hubris, and painful
failure. Cabrita and his men weren't just fighting
gorillas in the jungle in 1974. They were fighting
the ghosts of Viriathus, the crushed dreams of
King Afonso, the delusions of Dom Sebastian.
They were fighting the sheer, crushing weight
of a history that refused to let go of its own
myths. This raises an important question. The
film is incredibly impartial in its delivery.
It simply lays out the historical facts, the
recurring mistakes, and the grim reality of the
colonial war without moralizing or preaching
to the audience. Which is an impressive feat.
But in doing so, it casts a piercing, undeniable
look at the absolute futility of holding onto
decaying empires and outdated ideas. It forces
us to look inward at how historical fatalism,
the deeply held belief that we are just playing
out the same doomed scripts as our ancestors,
shapes the critical decisions we make today.
Are we actually learning from the know of history,
adapting and synthesizing like variathas fail
to do? Or are we just blindly marching forward,
waiting for our own modern battle of Alcacer
quibir? That is exactly the kind of question
this film wants you to wrestle with long after
the credits roll. And it leaves us with a final,
provocative thought for you to ponder on your
own as you go about your day. We saw how the
film contrasted the ugly muddy reality of a dying
war with the beautiful romanticized myth of Vasco
da Gama's Isle of Love. That contrast is key.
It makes you wonder about our present day. If
our modern struggles, our own corporate, political,
or personal battles, are often just echoes of
historical failures, our own modern, vain glories,
what islands of love are we currently building
in our minds? What utopian myths or comforting
ghosts are we telling ourselves right now to
hide the ugly realities of our own actions? It's
a heavy thought. It is a heavy thought, but a
necessary one to unpack, and it is exactly why
exploring complex cinema like this is so rewarding.
Thank you so much for joining us on this journey
through time, myth, and the cycles of history.
We hope you enjoyed exploring the profound depths
of NO or the Vainglory of Command as much as
we did. Keep questioning the narratives around
you, keep exploring, and we will catch you next
time for another deep dive.