The director of The Gilded Cage is back, and this time a French firm is coming for Lisbon's oldest weddings
Santo António – O Casamenteiro de Lisboa opened in Portuguese cinemas on Thursday. Rita Blanco and Joaquim Monchique play the city-hall staff who have run the Saint Anthony weddings for 25 years and are not about to let anyone modernise them.
Ruben Alves made his name filming Portuguese people in France. The film that opened in Portuguese cinemas on Thursday turns the journey around: France arrives in Lisbon, and wants to take charge of something no Lisboner thinks is theirs to take.
Santo António – O Casamenteiro de Lisboa is a comedy built around the Casamentos de Santo António, the mass wedding the city stages every June for its patron saint. A French company wants the contract, and wants the whole thing modernised. Carmo and Valentim, two Lisbon city-hall employees who have organised it for 25 years, are not having it, and answer the only way they can think of: by staging the best edition there has ever been.
Rita Blanco and Joaquim Monchique take the two leads. Around them sits a large cast — Maria Rueff, Isabel Abreu, Maria João Bastos, Ana Bola, Miguel Amorim, João Catarré, Jacqueline Corado, Valerie Braddell and Joaquim de Almeida — with NOS Audiovisuais distributing in Portugal.
The same seam, viewed from the other side
The premise did not come out of nowhere. Alves directed The Gilded Cage in 2013, about a Portuguese concierge couple in Paris who inherit a fortune, returned to French material with Miss France in 2020, and made the series Escort Boys in 2025. It is always the same cloth: two countries looking at each other and not quite understanding what they see. What has moved is the vantage point. The outsider is French this time, and the tradition under threat is a municipal ceremony that half of Lisbon treats as personal property.
Underneath the comedy sits the argument the city has most days now, about what survives when a symbol also becomes a product.
It arrives on a crowded Thursday
Five new films opened in Portugal this week, among them the Oasis tour documentary that also reached cinemas on Thursday, plus a Shrek re-release marking 25 years of the original.
The domestic competition matters more than it looks. Portuguese cinema has had a thin year at the box office: back in August, 9,208 admissions were enough to make a film the most-watched Portuguese release of 2026. A broad comedy with this cast, named after a Lisbon public holiday, is exactly the sort of film that usually moves that number — which makes the opening week worth watching.
By Lucy Bennett
Photo: Blablabla Media
