Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019)

Quite possibly the film least amenable to watching on a screener, particularly during the year-end crunch, Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela nevertheless made a significant impact. I will need to give it another viewing, particularly when it plays in Houston next year. But I wanted to at least jot down some tentative thoughts before everything evaporated.

First of all, I cannot be absolutely certain without a rewatch of Costa's earlier films -- Ossos has all but faded from my memory -- but it seems to me that Vitalina Varela is his darkest film to date, pushing the limits of visual legibility to the absolute breaking point. Where other filmmakers are content to explore themes on a human scale, Costa makes cinema that is, at its most fundamental level, about darkness and light. Every shot features one or two points of attention, saturated with a glowing, otherworldly illumination, as if carving their very forms out of the thick, tactile shadows.

Vitalina is another Fontainhas film, and Costa has continually depicted this poor section of Lisbon, populated by Cape Verdean immigrants, as an almost underground space, shut away from the ordinary world but somehow shot through with stray arrows of vertical sunlight. In Horse Money, Costa emphasized the coextensiveness of Fontainhas with a dreamscape, and here the crumbling walls, tin roofs, and dirt floors possess an even more chthonic atmosphere. 

This visual style accomplishes several things. It allows Costa and his cast to enact a tangible metaphor for the immigrant experience of Cape Verdeans, stranded in a twilight between Portugal and their home country. It heightens the sense of an immigrant community as a world unto itself, by making the spaces between homes and buildings into tunnels and grottoes, sealed off from the "surface." And perhaps most importantly, it allows Costa, both in the shooting of his films and in post-production, to manipulate the images of his actors and their surroundings, turning them into almost holy "light events," reminiscent of Caravaggio or Vermeer.

Following the near-death fantasia of Horse Money, Vitalina is surprisingly straightforward; it may be Costa's most accessible film to date. The title character is a Cape Verdean widow. Her husband Joaquim left her for Portugal 40 years ago, and never sent her money for a ticket to join him. Now, she arrives four days too late for his funeral. While interacting with various Fontainhas residents who knew him, Vitalina spends most of her time sorting through the things in his apartment, addressing him in his absence, and seeking counsel from the local priest (Costa regular Ventura).

Through Varela's stark, haunting performance, we experience this ramshackle Lisbon underworld as an outsider would. Vitalina is both saddened by its poverty (she remarks that her husband could have come back to her and lived much, much better) and regretful at the life she could have had, if Joaquim had only brought them together. She asks the priest to deliver a mass for Joaquim, but the priest's mind is wandering, and his faith seems to be on the wane.

Notably, the priest informs Vitalina that, in order to speak to Joaquim beyond the grave, she will have to learn Portuguese, as that is the language of spirits. She also remarks that her husband wrote her letters in Portuguese, knowing that she could barely understand them. So Costa is demonstrating how the colonial history of Cape Verde has scaled downward to infect the relationship of a single couple. The impact of cultural erasure has made Vitalina an "other" within her own marriage.

As I said, I need to see Vitalina Varela again, under better circumstances. But it's hard not to feel as if this is Costa's Uncle Boonmee -- a film that retains all the elements that distinguish its maker, but within an ever-so-slightly streamlined package. If Colossal Youth was an epic poem, and Horse Money was a Cubist portrait, Vitalina Varela might be as close as this filmmaker will ever come to a 19th century novel.