Director Pedro Costa
Costa with lead actress Vitalina Varela
VITALINA VARELA C+
Portugal (124) 2019 d:
Pedro Costa Official
site [Portugal]
Defiantly different, uncompromisingly bleak, existing in a world of its own
creation, it represents a kind of dream slumber, drawn
almost completely from the imagination, as there’s little here people can
actually relate to in their own lives, instead feeling overly literary, much of
it coming from the reading of letters, long speeches bearing little resemblance
to life as we know it. Comprised of
extremely long drawn-out shots, people barely move in this film, instead they
sit or stand and confess their innermost thoughts on camera, shrouded almost
completely in darkness, shot almost exclusively at night, with barely any light
creeping in. This is the kind of film
that draws plenty of praise from critics yet produces droves of walk-outs, as
there is little else in the cinema tradition that compares, leaving viewers unnerved
and confused, even a bit despondent, as they want to appreciate what they don’t
particularly care for. This kind of
filmmaking is so out of the mainstream that audiences should be forewarned
before entering the theater, as it’s not what you suspect, and can barely be
called cinema at all, instead it more closely resembles a dialogue-driven living
theater, a highly individualized staged expression, where theater audiences are
much more likely to endure the kinds of extremes shown with this
production. While there is a small group
of admirers who know who they are, this kind of heavily stylized filmmaking is
for them, conceived with film festivals in mind, with absolutely no commercial
prospects whatsoever. While there may
have been 100 viewers when the film began, it was closer to 60 or 70 who stayed
to the end, and far fewer who actually liked it. Existing in its own realm, utterly
uncompromising, it comes with plenty of accolades, having won the Golden
Leopard Grand Prize (1st place) at the Locarno Film Festival, while also
winning a Best Actress Award for the actress bearing the same name as the film
title. If you’ve seen even one of Pedro
Costa’s films, then you know what to expect, as the pace of the film is exasperatingly
slow. Except for a stunningly beautiful more
traditional documentary entitled NE CHANGE RIEN (Change Nothing) (2009) that is
shot completely in black and white, mostly in the studio with barely any trace
of movement, capturing rehearsal sessions of actress/musical performer Jeanne
Balibar, though revealed in fragments, never hearing an entire song, his other
films are just plain difficult, most of them shot in the reconstructed realms
of the now demolished Fontaínhas housing project, a home to largely immigrant
communities located just outside Lisbon.
Costa’s films follow a group of émigré’s originally from the
rocky and volcanic Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony established
to serve the African slave trade, who come to the mainland to find a better
life but are relegated to segregated lives in the poorest slums, living in
dilapidated shacks, eking out an existence of day labor jobs that leaves them ensnared
in a web of neverending poverty. While
they may originally have dreams of transporting their families, those dreams
die over time, as even their language is not really Portuguese or a Cape
Verdian dialect, but seems of a different world, reflective of their lost
identity that dissipates even further as the futility of their displaced lives
becomes even more apparent. The dominant
impression is the staged artificiality of the style, maximizing the photogenic
impact of every shot by the filmmaker himself or his longtime cinematographer
Leonardo Simões, where shadowy figures emerge from a darkness, lifeless and
bitterly deprived, appearing like ghosts, forced to confront their grim lives, yet
a vividly animated life can be heard offscreen, whether it be babies crying or
dogs barking, yet what’s captured onscreen is the utter stillness and solemnity
of isolated lives who are now dreadfully alone, cut off from the rest of the
world, downcast and spiritually depleted.
Expanded from her earlier brief appearance in HORSE MONEY (2014), the
film is based on the true story of its protagonist, the entitled character
Vitalina Varela, a non-professional actress who was born on Cape Verde Island,
who arrives at the airport in Lisbon three days after her husband’s
funeral. In the opening few sequences, a
slow funeral parade of weary bodies weaves its way past the walls of the
cemetery into the narrow alleyways of their decrepit homes while the camera
follows each one of the men as they open and close the metal doors of their
crumbling concrete homes, one after another, shot from a dizzying array of
angles, like a choreography of doors closing, yet the collective images suggest
they are sealing themselves into tomb-like coffins where they will likely die
in places just like this. Arriving
several days later, Vitalina is immediately told to go home, that there is
nothing for her in Portugal, signs of warning that feel just a bit
disingenuous, but may represent their own struggles with self-loathing, as the
rundown neighborhood is hardly a picture of success. Her view is that she waited 25 years to get
here, so she might as well stay, clearing out the empty liquor bottles from her
husband’s dingy home.
What we quickly learn is that Vitalina is a strong-willed woman
of extraordinary strength and resilience.
Flashback sequences reveal she married her husband Joaquim on the
island, happily building their own home brick by brick before he ventured to
Lisbon seeking work, returning briefly once, but then disappeared altogether,
with Vitalina learning he was in prison at some point, never knowing why, or
why he never fixed the leaky roof in this ramshackle home. What follows is a period of mourning, reduced
to lengthy monologues directed at her dead husband, whose spirit looms over the
entire landscape, exploring the traces he left behind while remaining embittered
for all the years he left her waiting alone without sending for her. He’s not the only casualty here, however,
with men reduced to scrounging through supermarket dumpsters or salvaging
scraps of metal, it’s a neighborhood where people are devoid of all hope. Even the local priest (Ventura, a Costa
regular) has lost his faith, with Vitalina remembering him from the island,
aware of the excruciatingly sad circumstances that gnaw at his ailing soul,
having what’s left of a tiny church with no parishioners, where she is the only
one who bothers to show up. Shot in
long, unbroken shots of her dimly lit face, revealing unfathomable depths of
anguish and pain, ghosts of the past comingle with the shadowy world of the
present, with Vitalina speaking in soliloquies, mostly seething with anger at her husband’s
philandering ways and broken promises, struggling with her own regrets, anxieties,
and grief, looking around at this godforsaken place, wondering why he stayed, addressing
him mournfully, “Here there is only bitterness.
Here we are nobody.” An
underlying message in Vitalina’s embattled relationship with her husband
mirrors the complex relationship Portugal has with its former colony, leaving
Cape Verdian immigrants displaced from either shore, tainted by the toxic
effects of the mother country that never lives up to its promise as a homeland.
The film takes a nostalgic twist at the
end, emerging from the cavernous darkness into the light of day, even under
openly blue skies, recalling that time she and her husband built their house
together in Cape Verde. Even if much of
the film is exasperating, feeling more like a slow death march, Costa has found
an original method to imprint his vision into our subconscious, literally
keeping the mood of his images in our heads long after the film is over. Add to that the somber reality of the people
who inhabit this human purgatory, where much of what we remember feels like an
elegy or a requiem, providing an almost classical frame for this highly
individualized and in many ways unpleasant journey.
