En avant, jeunesse!

Sometimes I watch drama to feel "thrust out from the depths." This is not a drama. This is in a way real and I didnt want to relate.

It is like this poor soul that I pass on the street and I didn't want to see again.

I can not actually like any of this characters. It is close to the ugly true. It is unpleasant to watch. The poverty smells very bad. I cant really accept even the metaphorical beginning as such.

It is skillfully shot. Light, composition - it is like a painting. A painting by Vincent van Gogh. It have the same dull colors as "The Potato Eaters". But except any presence of God.

My rating didn't matter. "I dint like it" doesn't mean nothing. The consummation term "rating" cant apply to this movie.

First off, I love the majority of reviews posted here.

I had to throw in my two cents though.

Director/Writer Pedro Costa is first an artist. This movie is part of a set of movies that can be dark, depressing, and at times even boring to watch but at the same time every shot and frame is done with a beauty and artistic message behind it. It can even be magical to watch at times. That hope can be found in it as well just adds to the message and beauty.

Half of me wishes his movies were not so long but the other half would say what would the Mona Lisa be like if it had been rushed and done in 90 minutes.

This film is an immersion in poverty: although each photographic set-up is richly subtle and brilliantly composed, the subject matter of the film deals with the poverty brought on by the destruction of the past, by the loss of jobs and family and community.

It should be stated at the onset that probably, were this film were shown in the average theatrical multiplex, 98% of the audience would walk out in the first fifteen or twenty minutes, as the pace is glacial, there is no plot to speak of, dialogue is fitful and seems to be aimless (although if one listens carefully, the effect is cumulatively meaningful) and there is almost no camera movement whatever--single set-ups are made and the viewer often sees the same scene for fifteen or twenty minutes.

As many reviews have noticed, there are definitive echoes of Samuel Beckett in the "I cant go on--I'll go on" mood that characterizes much of the absurdity of modern existence, and visually there are echoes of Vermeer--well, enough. If you want action, laughs, logic and easy entertainment this film ain't it; most people would hate sitting through any of this--if, however, you want an intellectual challenge from a thoughtful filmmaker, this might be in your queue--but don't expect the usual feel-good art film.

Ventura wanders around the fast-disappearing Lisbon slum called Fontainhas, running into his daughter, an old man guarding an empty open-air market, the locksmith who lets him into his new apartment, and assorted people whom he may or may not know. He. Drinks. And plays card games, noisily slapping the cards down. He complains that his wife has left him. After an hour or so, the fourth or fifth time he says she wanted one hundred thousand cigarettes, a car, a lava house, a forty-cent bouquet an a bottle of wine, I gave up and stopped watching.

This is the third movie in Pedro Costa's trilogy about the dead-end lives of people in Fontainhas. In the first, people seem emotionally inert. I have not seen the second, and these two don't encourage me in trying to. Here, at least, Ventura knows something is wrong, but the rituals with the card play and the repeated complaint makes me think he's been saying this for a long time. I understand the pleasure in airing grievances, but this looks like the empty aftermath of what might have once been a life, an anti-existential echo in which Hell is not other people, but yourself.

This filmmaker is Portuguese and has been chronicling the Cape Verdean immigrant population of Lisbon for some time. The Portuguese title means "Youth on the March;" it's not clear where the "Colossal" comes from in the English title, "Colossal Youth." In either case the phrases are presumably ironic. Nobody is going anywhere. Using cinema vérité methods, Costa focuses on Ventura, a tall, lean sixty-something Cape Verdean man living in Lisbon whose wife leaves his cave-like second-story slum dwelling, tossing out the window and thereby destroying a lot of the furniture before doing so. Ventura subsequently appears to wander around acting as "a genial but vacant guide" to a series of people he refers to as "children" or "son" or daughter" and who engage in "impossibly long-winded monologues" in "uniformly grimy, unlit interiors" (except for a couple of bright white ones in the new housing project that has since replaced the slum; these quotations are from Justin Chang's review in Variety written after the film's Cannes Festival screening). Occasionally Ventura, who refers to himself as a "retired laborer," recalls building projects he worked on when he first came to Lisbon and a fall he suffered during one of them, but he does not offer much commentary or advice to his younger interlocutors.

The visuals are mostly gray, with patches of color that sing out in contrast. Ventura plays cards; look as at a new apartment in the project; listens there to Vanda (Vanda Duarte, subject of an earlier Costa film) talking about her painful childbirth experience,and later with her child; plays cards or eat with "sons;" and visits the national museum where another "son" is a guard.

Costa offers less to viewers (and conversely perhaps gives them more to do) than almost any filmmaker presenting lives and people. Hence, in part paradoxically, he has a "coterie of fans" whom this new film will keep in "rapt attention"-- while doubtless "proving a colossal bore to anyone else" (Justin Chang again). Costa is a minimalist, and in minimal art, less is more; with success, the principle of the "tremendous trifle" will apply. Elements that elsewhere would go unnoticed will become significant or beautiful. The online cinephile writer Aquerello (Strictly Film School) believes this to be true of Colossal Youth and says of Ventura that his "lean and angular physicality cuts a dark and sinuous figure as majestic and transfixing as the works of art that frame him" in the museum. Aquerello further comments on the film's most studied element, in which an injured laborer asks Ventura to write a letter home to his girlfriend --a letter, Aquerello speculates, that also subsequently "becomes an expression of the wan protagonist's own sense of abandonment since his wife has left him." Aquerello calls the repetition of the letter's phrases in the film an "incantation." This, he thinks, typifies "the transfiguration of the corporeal into the ethereal through mundane ritual" of the film's "awkward composition, disarming humility, and poetic ineloquence."

In its most elaborated form the letter Aquerello refers to goes like this:

"My love, being together again will brighten our lives for at least 30 years. I'll come back to you strong and loving. I wish I could offer you 100,000 cigarettes, a dozen fancy dresses, a car, the little lava house you always dreamed of, a threepenny bouquet. But most of all, drink a bottle of good wine and think of me. Here, it's nothing but work. There are over a hundred of us now. Did my letter arrive safely? Still nothing from you. Some other time. Every day, every minute, I learn beautiful new words for me and you alone made to fit us both, like fine silk pajamas, wouldn't you like that? I can only send you one letter a month. I often get scared building these walls. Me with a pick and cement, you with your silence, a pit so deep, it swallows you up. It hurts to see these horrors that I don't want to see. Your lovely hair slips through my fingers like dry grass. Often, I feel week and think I'm going to forget you."

The overwhelming impression of Ventura is of fatigue, and one of my points of reference from literature for Costa's film-making as exhibited in "Colossal Youth" is the novels and to a lesser extent the plays of Samuel Beckett. "I can't go on. I'll go on," is a famous Beckett conclusion. Beckett's Irish gift for the music of language served him so well that he deliberately switched to French to limit himself, though in his own English translations of the results, especially the plays, the poetry still sings in the mud and ruins of his devastated dead-end characters' lives.

Beckett works entirely with the ear- and mind-stimulating power of words. However impoverished the vocabulary, in the hands of a master words can work magic. That may happen intermittently with the images and sound in Costa's film. What lasts, though, is a sense of the hopelessness of urban immigrant poverty.