060 REVIEW
Directed by
PEDRO COSTA
Starring
VITALINA VARELA
VENTURA
MANUEL TAVARES ALMEIDA
Released
6 MARCH
ANTICIPATION.
A new Costa is an event –
not “event” like a party,
“event” like an earthquake.
ENJOYMENT.
An ideal introduction to Costa’s
work – don’t be intimidated.
IN RETROSPECT.
Rich, mysterious, rigorous and
generous.
edro Costa’s films are epic in scope,
beginning with the lighting; pushed to
extremities of brightness and darkness
which suggest the origins of all human drama.
Nocturnal frames are so voluptuously dark – he
films in what Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy refers to as, “the
Bible-black predawn,” when the only ones stirring
are the maids at the bus stop – that you have to scan
the shadows to see where people begin and their
surroundings end. Make the effort.
In low-angle chiaroscuro close-ups, people
appear as if transfixed by floodlights, and deliver
husky soliloquies derived from the stories Costa
learns from his nonvocational actors. Just as
eloquent are faces like that of Vitalina Varela’s title
character, played by a woman of the same name,
who arrives in Portugal from Cape Verde too late for
her husband’s funeral. Against her jet-black widow’s
weeds of leather jacket and head scarf, the planes of
her face, the dome of her head, the ridge of her nose
appear cast in relief. She is a monument to herself.
After 1997’s Ossos, made with residents of
Lisbon’s Fontaínhas slum, Costa shifted to a more
stripped-down method, with a tiny crew and more
collaborative narratives for the semidocumentary In
Vanda’s Room, from 2002. He got closer to the world
just as it was being demolished, with Fontaínhas’
residents relocated to the brutalist midrise towers
we see in 2006’s Colossal Youth. A static camera,
slow pacing, sculptural framings and Caravaggio
lighting grant Costa’s characters rootedness,
even as he also acknowledges their displacement.
People in Costa films carry many times and placesinside them. In 2014’s Horse Money, his totemic
actor Ventura wanders a hospital, lost in a maze of
memories of postcolonial migration and encounters
with his exploited comrades. This includes Vitalina
Varela, in her first appearance in a Costa film, as a
Cape Verdean arriving in Lisbon after news of her
husband’s death, suggesting that Horse Money’s
elusive chronology also extends into the future, to
this new film.
Costa reinvents his style with every film;
Vitalina Varela features his most linear, legible plot
(a word not used lightly). Vitalina disembarks from
the plane, barefoot, in Portugal at last to settle the
affairs of the husband who left her behind decades
ago. In the concrete shantytown of Cova da Moura
on Lisbon’s outskirts, weary men hover like crows,
and tell her of her husband’s lonely, alienated
life in the foreign land that now holds his body,
over the four decades she spent resenting him for
abandoning his home for a new one he never found.
Vitalina Varela is an inversion of Graham
Greene’s The Third Man, with a stranger in a strange
land on the trail of an old friend, hearing new stories
that gradually soften her heart to him. In another
Greene-ish touch, Ventura appears as the anguished
parish priest, his quavering faith represented by the
same tremor that afflicted him in Horse Money. It’s
simultaneously sad to see Ventura – whom we’ve
known since Colossal Youth – as his body wanes,
and remarkable to see the performance he gives,
imbuing new fictions with haunting depth. Costa’s
cinema is down-to-earth and bigger than life.
MARK ASCHVitalina Varela
P