Vitalina Varela - 2019
Vitalina Varela was my first introduction into the incomparable lyrical world of Pedro Costa. It will not be my last.
This is a story about a woman returning to the dark and dingy alleys of Lisbon in search of any last traces of her now deceased husband. Did you get that whole sentence ingested and processed to the full? Are you ready? Now, do this…forget it completely! This is Costa, and plot means next to nothing.
So what stands in its place, you ask? The shots, my goodness the shots! This is the strongest distillation I have yet seen of the distinct notion of film as composition. Each sequence, in other words, is a separate painterly work of art. Vitalina is a tale of grief and loss, bitterness and torment told almost exclusively through the use of light and dark, framing and staging. Characters rarely speak, and when they do it is almost past each other like figures in a dream. When words are spoken, figures like our heroine often resort to monologues pitched at a near whisper towards unseen phantoms like her husband’s ghost.
Costa favors static shots of still creations, painstakingly organized to create an effect. In reality, the characters just mentioned are almost placed in shots like dollhouse figurines. You can almost see Costa setting up the camera, shuffling this back piece of mise en scene over that way, angling this character’s face this way, dropping a cloth over the light in one corner, etc. He ends the previous sequence, and then without warning, a staged shot just POPS onto the screen like a Caravaggio. It's breathtaking.
This is the quintessential show don’t tell picture. The cinematography creates mood not through words but picture and light. We soon realize that Vitalina is a tortured, embittered soul. The shots pile up until they become mesmeric, and her pain becomes our own. While not a ton is actually happening externally, this aesthetic actually (if we’ll let it) allows us into the world of grief that someone must feel when they lose an estranged loved one.
That would be my ultimate defense for anyone who would want to deride this work as just hoity-toity claptrap from an individual hunting for that capital A artistic appellation. Scant evidence of a plot though there may be, what is onscreen is entirely in step with the proceedings. Sometimes expressionistic tendencies just get us to the emotional core of character and story better than all else.
In summary, Vitalina Varela is not a film for everyone. Framing shots with light vs. dark which simultaneously creates the look of a painting and serves to use negative space to full effect may not be most viewers’ cup of tea. Others will find this so hyper-slow that they'll be fighting sleep. But for me, this was simply dour filmmaking that became transformative, relentlessly bleak but somehow transcendentally beautiful. A very demanding but ultimately rewarding watch. Funereal and ecstatic, lofty and way down low. I will not be missing Mr. Costa’s future offerings.
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