Cats Don't Have Vertigo (Portuguese title: Os Gatos Não Têm Vertigens) is a 2014 Portuguese dramedy film directed by António-Pedro Vasconcelos.
Jó is a delinquent with a hard life and he's just turned 18, allowing his abusive father to kick him out of the house. His estranged mother won't take him in, so he makes do by sleeping on the rooftop of an apartment building and takes refuge in his writing. Below him lives Rosa, a woman in her 70s, recently widowed and alienated from her family who would rather commit her to a nursing home. Against all odds, Jó and Rosa become friends and start living together.
Tropes:
- Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: Rosa wants to spread her husband's ashes on the river Tejo, but that's illegal, so she enlists Jó to help her out by distracting the boat's passengers. This is the first time they really bond.
- Cool Old Lady: Rosa is very open-minded regarding the mysterious kid who came from nowhere to squat in her rooftop; she gives him food and various amenities to make him more comfortable and eventually just straight up invites him to live with her. She's also not much of a stickler for the rules. Her rebelling against the old Estado Novo dictatorship alongside her husband also gives her cool points.
- Intergenerational Friendship: A kid on the cusp of adulthood and an elderly lady become best friends.
- Lonely Together: Both Jó and Rosa are alienated by their biological families and a society which looks down on them for various reasons, but they find solace in each other's company.
- May–December Romance: Averted, though the possibility gets discussed (usually maliciously) by the other characters and those remarks feature heavily in the trailer, which can be misleading. Jó also cracks wise about how he doesn't need a girlfriend when he has Rosa, but it's obviously in jest and he does get a stable girlfriend his age.
- Odd Friendship: Besides the large age gap between Jó and Rosa, there's also the fact that Jó is a hard delinquent (albeit hiding a sensitive side as seen in his writing) and Rosa is an unassuming old lady who has lived a fairly comfortable life (although as she tells Jó, she and her husband had their share of troubles fighting the Estado Novo regime).
- Scatterbrained Senior: Many of the characters assume Rosa's mind is going, which frustrates her. While she does frequently talk to an apparition of her dead husband, it seems to be mainly to cope with her loneliness, and most things point to her being pretty lucid and functional. She also takes advantage of people's assumptions about her to get away with things like smoking in public spaces for a short while.
