“Fire of Wind” Is a Bold and Inspired Début

It’s a great relief to watch “Fire of Wind,” the first feature by the Portuguese director Marta Mateus, and to see more than simply pictures of actors acting. Most of what gets released is more or less the same, in form if not in quality. The script dominates, the performers act out the script in realistic fashion, bringing out their characters’ psychology, and the directors record the acting—sometimes imaginatively, sometimes less so—in a way that showcases the dramatic text, as if the movie were a play that just happened to be liberated from the stage. “Fire of Wind” is altogether different: there’s certainly a story that involves people behaving plausibly and there is a cast of performers on view throughout, but this cast mainly features residents of the movie’s southern Portuguese loca