#510: COSTA, Pedro: In Vanda's Room (2000)

LETTERS FROM FONTAINHAS: THREE FILMS BY PEDRO COSTA {Spine #508}

COSTA, Pedro (Portugal)

In Vanda's Room [2000]

Spine #510
DVD

For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas Trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films' larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda's Room takes an unflinching fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital. This was Costa's first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium's most astonishing.

171 minutes
Color

Stereo

in Portuguese

1:33:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2010

Director

Pedro Costa was 42 when he directed In Vanda's Room.

Other Costa films in the Collection:

#509: Ossos (1997)

#511: Colossal Youth (2006)

The Film

Great filmmakers often find themselves at a dead-end street, oblivious to commercial concerns, and struggling to find a path to a new vision.

Such was the case for Costa, after the huge success of Ossos (1997) [Spine #509]. His producer, Paulo Branco, wanted him to follow it up with something even more massive, but Costa had decided (apparently during the Ossos shoot) that he wanted to do the opposite.

He jettisoned the big crew (including the incredible French DP Emmanuel Machuel), bought himself a Panasonic DV camera and basically became a one-man crew, after literally moving into the Fontainhas neighborhood — specifically Vanda and Zita Duarte’s room.

**

There is no denying that this film is an auteur masterpiece (though Costa says he hates the term auteur) …

There is also no denying that l71 minutes is a big ask of any audience, and that tedium is inevitable, even though the film brilliantly holds your attention with its long takes, its static holds on unpopulated rooms and walls.

This is brave — and most importantly — truthful cinema. Costa completely stripped away even the slightest hint of artifice (unlike Ossos, which had a minimal plot, and had actors playing characters) and produced a film that is completely non-judgmental of its subjects, who would normally be unappealing and off-putting to the average middle-class film lover.

That in itself makes In Vanda’s Room a classic for the ages.

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

Forty-eight page booklet featuring essays by critics Cyril Neyrat, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Luc Sante, Thom Andersen, and Mark Peranson, as well as a reprint by film historian Bernard Eisenschitz.

Neyrat:

“Costa bought a Panasonic DV and went to Fontainhas alone, every day. Vanda and Zita had invited him into their room. ‘Come, you’ll see what our lives are really like. You used to ask us to be quiet; now we’re going to talk, you’re going to listen. That’s all we do, talk and take drugs.’ Over six months, alone with his DV camera, a mirror he found on-site, and cobbled-together reflectors, Costa reinvented his cinema: facing the bed, he looked for frames and strove to master the light that came through a single tiny window,  as in a Dutch painting.”

Cabo:

“Free from the production constraints that controlled his previous works, Costa finds himself facing the destruction of the space he so diligently tried to describe in Ossos, along with the people who have been left behind, waiting for eviction … distance is abolished; the world that matters is here. The margins become the center, protected from the outside world.”

Andersen:

“Costa’s work with the soundtrack is just as exacting as his work with the image track, but it doesn’t reveal itself immediately. What I noticed first was the strong presence, the predominance even, of offscreen sound. The destruction of the community is shown sparingly, but it is often present on the soundtrack,and it becomes louder and more insistent as the film draws to a close … the image divides, sound unites.”

Commentary

Featuring Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin.

Things you learn from the commentary, not obvious from watching the film:

1. Costa spent months in a bizarre fashion of pre-production, just settling into a corner of the girls’ room and filming hours of them just sleeping. [He mentions Warhol films with a flash of amusement.]
2. The mic on the DV camera was useless for capturing live sound. Virtually the entire film was ADR’d, including the background noise …
3. A painful year of editing with Dominique Auvray. She apparently wanted to make something more romantic or poetic, which of course Costa firmly resisted. They were working with around 180 hours of digital film.

Gallery

Of photos by Richard Dumas.

Posed B&W shots with a skinny Costa and some of the cast.

Japanese theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

55 + 36 =

91

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