#511: COSTA, Pedro: Colossal Youth (2006)

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

COSTA, Pedro (Portugal)

Colossal Youth [2006]

Spine #511
DVD

Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda's Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa's Fontainhas films a new tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in a low-cost housing complex in Lisbon, who had been abandoned by his wife and spends his days visiting his neighbors, whom he considers his "children." What results is a form of ghost story, a tale of derelict, dispossessed people living in the past and present at the same time, filmed by Costa with empathy and startling radiance.

156 minutes
Color

Stereo

in Portuguese

1:33:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2010

Director

Pedro Costa was 48 when he directed Colossal Youth.

Other Costa films in the Collection:

#509: Ossos (1996)

#510: In Vanda’s Room (2000)

The Film

The best of the trilogy. Costa had honed his technique over a decade of working in this unique, naturalistic style. In the first film, he started with a story, his actors playing characters; in the second everyone plays themselves, and we begin to see the destruction of the neighborhood.

Here — in the third and final installment — Fontainhas is about to disappear forever.

**

In Vanda’s Room focused on Vanda and her sister, Zita (now deceased, IRL) — but other characters — “the boys”/the hardcore junkies — made appearances throughout the film.

Here, Costa focuses on one major character — the enigmatic Ventura, whose very soul Costa captures with his camera in stillness and dignity.

Dignity is the operative word here … the man is both impenetrable and translucent; he is both fool and prophet.

**

Vanda makes an early appearance. Venture visits her in her new home (the slum-dwellers are being moved to sterile, low-income housing). She has a daughter, and her life has changed.

The final four shots are examplars of Costa’s magnificent talent:

1. A long rightward pan that begins light dappling of trees; birds chirping — we see a canal, peaceful, but as the camera completes its pan, we see a highway in the background, and the sound of the traffic in the sound design gets louder. Finally, the camera holds on an old bridge over the canal, and we see Ventura (we recognize him by the bandage around his head) and his friend in a little boat, paddling across the shot. (Naturally, Costa holds the still image for several more seconds …)
2. Ventura is knocking on Vanda’s door (Dutch angle) … “Papa” is just in time to babysit her daughter; she is going to clean the next-door lady’s apartment. She puts on her apron, an ever-present cigarette in her mouth;
3. Ventura is standing in front of some red roses. He leaves the frame; Costa holds on the flowers …
4. Ventura is lying on Vanda’s bed, one leg crossed over the other, raised high, making soft moaning noises. Beatriz is barely visible in the lower-right of the frame — but her face is illuminated. The sound of children playing outdoors …

Film Rating (0-60):

57

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:

“Ventura is the one to dictate the film’s form, to invite Costa to leave behind the horizontality of the chronicle for the verticals and oblique lines of the great epic form. Ventura is a block of strangeness, an anachronistic presence who carries with him the entire history of his people and their neighborhood. Costa keeps a low profile in front of Ventura, set his camera at a low angle to raise the film to the heights of its hero.”

Cabo:

“Costa films it as an underground universe, a sort of wasteland whose secrets and passages are known only to those who have gained access. Ventura seems to be the only one who knows every path by heart and who possesses the keys of time — he commutes from one world to another, between the past of the ruined neighborhood and houses of Casal de Boba, where residents are relocated. He walks slowly, touching the walls; we’ll never know the distance he covers to find and meet his lost sons and daughters.”

Peranson:

“Ventura, too, needs a new roof but is concerned that there won’t be enough room in his apartment for his children, who, we come to realize, are either numerous or nonexistent. As he encounters them in a variety of Lisbon locations, linked more by spatial contrast (and, among other variables, cleanliness) than time — disheveled shacks in the process of being torn down, a furniture store, those new developments (in particular, Vanda’s room), a hospital ward — he hears their deeply personal stories of familial struggle. For one such child, Lento (Alberto ‘Lento’ Barros), his roommate in a past-present rickety shack, Ventura repeats a love letter eight times, exhorting his illiterate friend to memorize it and send it back home to his family in Cape Verde. Every actor in the film is coded as a father, mother, or child, and every single one is a storyteller who wants his or her years of suffering to end.”

Video conversation

Between Costa and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin.

Proving once again the discussing a film like this is an impossible exercise in futility.

Japanese theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

57 + 36 =

93

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