A portrait of an obsessive love affair, Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca is based on a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, whose work he’d later adapt twice more. The book’s re-telling of a troubled passage in real-life author Camilo Castelo Branco’s life—his friend José Augusto embarked on a perverse game of marital cat-and-mouse with Francisca, the woman the novelist loved—led Oliveira to new levels of stylistic and formal imagination. (It helped that his wife, a distant relative of the historical Francisca, gave him access to a cache of the woman’s letters.) With its elaborate title cards, abundance of shots in which the action is oriented directly toward the camera, gloomy interiors, and show-stopping gala set-pieces, Francisca is an exacting, sumptuous, utterly inimitable cinematic experience, and one of Oliveira’s crowning achievements.