Night is practically eternal in “Vitalina Varela,” the new picture from the Portuguese master Pedro Costa. In this vision, the barrios of Fontainhas, in Lisbon, where much of Costa’s work has been set and shot, seem to have mostly migrated underground. (In reality, the barrios have been so transformed over the years that they no longer exist as such.) The movie’s opening shot is exemplary: a beautifully framed (in the almost square Academy ratio) view of an alleyway, the curve of the gray wall on its left creating a visually attractive angle. At the top of the frame, black; it’s a submerged alley, and at the top right you can see some crosses planted in the ground above. Some men come through the space; it’s a funeral procession.
In a little while, we see an airport tarmac, again at night. It is always startling to see things like planes in a Costa picture. A group of workers, rolling buckets and holding mops and brooms, approach one plane. There’s a close-up of the stairs at the plane’s exit: a pair of bare feet, battered and almost bloated by years of labor and who knows what else. As they move down the stairs, large drops of water splotch them. We don’t know if this is rain, or tears. The workers greet the disembarking passenger: “Vitalina, you arrived too late. Your husband was buried days ago. There is nothing in Portugal for you.”
This is the title character, played by a woman who bears the same name — as stylized as Costa’s films now are, they never break free of the reality that grounds his ethos. In the subsequent scenes, in exchanges with mourning neighbors and a man of the cloth played by Ventura, a long time Costa performer, Vitalina plumbs the depths of the aforementioned nothing.
In monologues mostly delivered in the meager quarters that Vitalina settles in, she recalls the past she and her husband shared in Cape Verde, the island many Fontainhas residents have a strong connection to. Together, they built a house. But the challenges of poverty pulled them apart. This movie has a distant affinity to the classic “Make Way For Tomorrow,” and with the more recent mortality play “The Irishman.”
“You turned your face to death. You could have stayed in Cape Verde,” Vitalina cries to her dead husband. “We didn’t have much, but it was ours.”
While Costa’s earlier work traded in a demanding, stylized, austere (some would call it punishingly so) realism, in recent years his view has taken on a stunning pictorialism. In the opening shots of this film, one thinks of Goya and Velasquez; the clouds in the night sky evoke El Greco.
It is not inaccurate to call Costa an acquired taste. In the case of this reviewer, it was a road to Damascus experience with the 2007 film “Colossal Youth,” which required a second viewing to yield its epiphany, Like that picture, “Vitalina Varela” is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.
Vitalina Varela
Not rated. In Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
