Brandos Costumes (1974) is a Portuguese film directed by Alberto Seixas Santos which was a part of the Novo Cinema movement – influenced by the cinematographic neo-realism and specially by the Nouvelle Vague.
A portrait of the everyday life of a typical middle-class family in parallel with the fall of the Estado Novo, the 48-year dictatorship led by Salazar.
[2] The daughters' conflicts and frustrations with their parents, their grandmother and their maid find an obvious echo in the country's collective events.
As a rupturing film, Brandos Costumes is less identifiable by the presence of avant-garde aesthetics or an agile plot with a daring structure - not like Belarmino, by Fernando Lopes or O Cerco, by António da Cunha Telles - than by its ideological left-wing posture, taking a portrait of the social classes, and by its social and political sense of critic.
Some characteristics of the new generation films, revolted with the state of things and motivated to denounce the social injustices, are clearly present in Brandos Costumes.