Northern Portugal. A large bourgeois house, its garden, its magnolia. As we know, the house is a place that cinema, this art of the outdoors, has often chosen to represent less the joys of family life than a deadly space. André Gil Mata made it his stage; with its rooms, its furniture, what is played out there, what has been played out there. From one room to another, from one era to another, the film digs into this closed space, like a sort of stifling box. The characters come and go, Alzira, more prisoner than real mistress of the place, Beatriz the servant. Class play and distribution of roles by gender. With the neighboring bell tower overhanging, a space is drawn that is as much a (old-fashioned) showcase as a vault (of desires, feelings), where the unsaid, the frustrations ooze out amidst the silences. From one era to another, we move to the rhythm of moments of restrained tension (here a silent confrontation, there a game with caged birds) as to that of the seasons – but do they really pass? With few words, gestures as if slowed down, and a few objects, here a dresser, there an old photo, traces of memories, life and affects, the film depicts a suspended time, with its new beginnings, its heaviness. While windows opening onto the outside reach us as if muffled and in fragments a distant world. Everything is played out in this hushed, confined space, sumptuously filmed in long enveloping shots, with rare and slow camera movements, like the quasi immobility of the figures, children included.