Pedro Costa: Post-Punk Poet of Portugal, Part 2

COLOSSAL YOUTH / Juventude Em Marcha
(Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Switzerland, 2006, 155 minutes)

Click here for part one

"[H]is slow-moving, impressively photographed and deliberately repetitious zero-tech docudramas about the degraded lives of the poor will infuriate and alienate far more people than they please."
--Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

"This is so out of the zeitgeist I don't know where to begin."
--Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope

Like Robert Bresson, Pedro Costa prefers to work with non-professionals. 

To a person, they have intriguing faces: young, old, male, female, Portuguese, and Cape Verdean. Like Béla Tarr and Tsai Ming-Liang, he patiently follows his photogenic performers around. While the filmmaker eschews non-diegetic music, movement and ambient sound are constant. 

Clearly, he finds his subjects fascinating. Consequently, he encourages them to incorporate biography into their performances. Some viewers share his fascination and appreciate the trust he places in his cast. Some don't.

After watching O Sangue, Casa de Lava, and now Colossal Youth, I'm thankful for that trust. And I'm confounded by those critics who find his work so exasperating--if not unendurable. Variety's Justin Chang, for instance, feels that Colossal Youth is "weighed down by its soporific structure, deliberately indolent pacing and endlessly attenuated conversations among a clutch of ill-defined personalities."

Costa's films may not move quickly, but they aren't exactly endurance tests either. (Comparing Colossal Youth to Andy Warhol's 485-minute Empire, for instance, would be foolhardy at best.) Because they're so intimate and empathetic, however, I wonder if his detractors aren't reacting to something beyond their lack of forward momentum. To quote the NME's Stuart Maconie, "Yes, there are people in the world who do not love Scott Walker. But what must their hearts be like?" Just replace Walker with Costa.

Often cited as his best--and "slowest"--effort, Colossal Youth begins with a woman, possibly insane, hounding an unidentified man from their home. She could be his wife, his lover--Costa doesn't say. The grey-haired figure dodges her knife, but in the fracas, all of his belongings are destroyed. Soon afterwards, a middle-aged fellow shows the elderly gentleman around an empty apartment. Both sport dark suits, but the former flaunts a flashier ensemble. Presumably, he's a government housing agent.

Afterward, the latter chats with a methadone user about her daughter's welfare. As it transpires, the locations are the lower-class Lisbon neighborhoods of Fontaínhas and Casal da Boba. Costa has visited this rapidly-changing area before, starting with 1997's Ossos ("Bones"). 

This time around, his main man is the mono-monikered Ventura, and the chain-smoking mother is Vanda Duarte, focus of 2001's In Vanda's Room (No Quarta de Vanda). Ventura appears to be sharing her living quarters, but since she plans on leaving, he takes the apartment from the earlier sequence. The three films form the Vanda Trilogy.

Visitors frequent the new place, like his friend, Paulo. As with Ivorian actor Isaach de Bankolé's Leão in Casa de Lava, Ventura hails from Cape Verde. His callers do most of the talking, while he listens. The exception is Lento, for whom he is composing a love letter. In these scenes, Ventura does most of the talking--or more precisely, reciting, since memorization replaces pen and paper. It is, indeed, the same letter featured in Casa de Lava.

A retired laborer, Ventura is only a rung or two above his "children" on the socio-economic ladder. "The flat's too big for you alone," notes Paulo says the new digs. "It's for all of us," Ventura respons. Some even call him Papa.

Costa continues to slowly parcel out information about this community, like the name of the woman from the opening sequence. She is Ventura's wife, Clotilde (she will not return). The director also makes little distinction between past and present. Ventura's encounters with the letter-recipient, for example, appear to take place in the past as he's dressed more casually and the dark interiors are even murkier. In addition, Ventura's head is bandaged in these scenes, a reference to the workplace injury that hastened his retirement--yet another link with Casa de Lava.

There's so much formal control behind Costa's painterly compositions and poetic pacing that accusations of carelessness--or self-indulgence--would be misplaced. Either he wants viewers to make these distinctions themselves, he's showing the world as Ventura sees it, or he's reacting to the over-accentuated clarity of conventional cinema, or some combination thereof. 

Though his films don't look surrealistic, it's difficult to distinguish internal from external reality, hence the comparisons to David Lynch. It makes little sense on the surface--Costa forgoes reptilean babies, rabbit-headed families, Robert Blake, etc.--but their movies share a dream-like logic.

As James Quandt mentions in his Artforum essay (reprinted in the program), Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie had a profound affect on the filmmaker, and Costa often shoots Ventura from low, practically subterranean angles, as if he were a zombie or a statue. Ventura is a tall, gaunt, still figure of a man. There's nothing frightening about his placid visage, but there's something eerie about his preternatural composure.

And so it goes with the rest of the film. Though leisurely-paced, there's always something going on. Much has been made about the long takes, but they're not completely static. This is also true of Tarr and Ming-Liang's films. Their cinematographers may not move often or quickly, but the subjects within their viewfinders are always engaged in some kind of activity.

Nevertheless, Colossal Youth inspired "mass walk-outs" at festivals and events in Cannes, London, New York, and Vancouver--all film-savvy cities. Will Seattle prove its mettle, and break the cycle? It remains to be seen, but here's hoping the intrepid souls who take it on stay until the end.

My advice: Do like British film critic Neil Young and load up on "artificial stimulation" beforehand. In his case: "a black coffee and a can of sugar-free Red Bull." Or feel free to walk in and out of the screening, just as Ventura rambles about his ramshackle environs. That was, apparently, Costa's original intention, making Colossal Youth closer to performance art than most movies are prepared to go.

[colossal youth]

Note: I apologize that I failed to explore Costa's interest in post-punk further. Not counting the use of and/or allusions to The The (O Sangue), Wire and Gang of Four (Ossos), and the Young Marble Giants (Colossal Youth), I would have to spend more time with his work to determine exactly how it relates to or has influenced his filmography. He does, after all, also integrate music from Cats (In Vanda's Room). Oh, and about that Gang of Four number. It only plays for a few seconds, but I'd recognize that squealing guitar line anywhere--it's "To Hell With Poverty."

Still Lives - The Films of Pedro Costa continues this week at the Northwest Film Forum. In Vanda's Room plays Mon, Dec 10, at 6 and 9:15 pm, Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? plays Tues, Dec 11, at 6:30 and 9:15pm, and Colossal Youth concludes the series on Wed, Dec 12, at 6:30 and 9:15pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave on Capitol Hill. For more information, please call (206) 329-2629. Images from The New York Times (Ventura in Colossal Youth / Credit: Pedro Costa/Luso), The Vancouver International Film Centre, and Neil Young's Film Lounge.