Pedro Costa Summons a Dark Night of Grief

A funeral procession emerges from the pitch-black middle of a walled cemetery exterior of Lisbon. Mourners transfer previous the digital camera, however nobody speaks of the deceased or of anything. For the primary 10 minutes of Pedro Costa’s newest, “Vitalina Varela,” wordless sound design and an immersive darkness settle in, the storytelling restricted to the aftermath of illness and an unknown man’s final days.

Costa’s movies typically star first-time or different nonprofessional actors enjoying variations of themselves, with storylines reflecting their actual lives, parts of fiction and documentary forming a seamless entire; as such Vitalina Varela performs “herself.” And because the movie opens, and Vitalina arrives, she’s three days too late. The funeral was for Joaquim, the husband who deserted Vitalina years earlier, and this three-day passage quantities to an anti-resurrection. Here, the useless keep useless.

Vitalina positions herself within the shadowy, crumbling hovel the place Joaquim lived and died, and whispers her true story by way of sporadic monologues to, if not his ghost, then to his lingering atmospheric presence. Decades earlier, they had been collectively in Cape Verde, constructed a house there aspect by aspect, till the day he fled for Portugal and a dissolute life, one spent “chasing street women,” one which additionally included an unspecified period of time in jail.

Meanwhile, Vitalina waited for a reunion that by no means got here. “You turned your face to death,” she scolds the darkness, typically fixing her stern gaze on a makeshift altar of candles and pictures, “We could have stayed in Cape Verde… here there is only bitterness, here we are nothing.”

Breaking the lengthy, affected person silences between Vitalina’s recollections, Joaquim’s fellow impoverished Cape Verdeans wander into the body, some muttering their very own reminiscences. The refrain of mourners echo narrative themes of displacement, loneliness, and the brutal legacy of their immigrant standing and therapy by the ruling Portuguese, all motifs present in Costa’s earlier movies “In Vanda’s Room,” “Colossal Youth,” and particularly 2014’s “Horse Money,” the place an abbreviated model of Vitalina’s story first appeared.

Costa and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Leonardo Simões, bodily immerse these characters in close to whole darkness — together with a show-stopping second by which Vitalina tries to restore the roof of Jaoquim’s destroyed residence throughout a storm in the midst of the evening — permitting solely essentially the most oblique gentle parts into the body. The result’s a staggeringly stunning and concurrently stricken chiaroscuro, appropriating the Divine gentle of classical portray for the needs of non secular disaffection.

In preserving with this, an actor named Ventura — a member of Costa’s firm of gamers and star of “Colossal Youth” and “Horse Money” — arrives enjoying a bodily disabled priest. Ventura performs Mass in an empty, decaying chapel, and he’s burdened with the necessity to are likely to as lots of his fellow Cape Verdeans as potential by any means he can summon. He’s the one individual to have an prolonged dialog with Vitalina, and to additional illuminate the distress of colonization, even after loss of life, he informs her that as a way to communicate to Joaquim’s spirit, she’ll have to take action in Portuguese.

By centering the real-life experiences of his actors, Costa’s conscientious cinema lives in a completely humane house. Material deprivation and unrelenting evening present a blackened backdrop for quiet intimacy and dignity. Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a type of storytelling solidarity together with his actors, one the place there’s no buffer of irony, no distancing results. There could also be nothing to melt his characters’ ache, however there’s nonetheless nice proof of mutual care.

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