User reviews

this is one unique film form Portuguese director Pedro Costa.it's a film that definitely requires more than one viewing in order to fully understand it.i liked it,but there's no doubt it's challenging.however,that just makes the experience more rewarding once we do comprehend what it is we have witnessed.as for this movie,though i didn't completely grasp the meaning of it all,i did like the look and the atmosphere of it.colours were used to very good effect.dialogue is used very sparingly here,and that works in the film's favour as well.keep in mind going in,this a movie that will challenge you and make you use your mind.if you're not wiling to be engaged mentally,this isn't your film.

Imagine going on a date with a really boring individual only to be told, once the date was finished, that you've been set up with that person's even duller sib. That begins to describe how I felt as I watched this deadening precursor to the terminally enervating "In Vanda's Room".

Pedro Costa is a veritable master of ennui. Clearly, during the course of his sluggish career, he has thoroughly imbibed the spirit of Akerman, Rohmer and Figgis. Consider the first half hour wherein we are treated to scenes of characters vacuming an apartment, walking at interminable length down a Lisbon slum street, taking a drink of water from a kitchen faucet, staring off into space (lots of that) smoking (this is, after all, a European film), doing a whole lot of not talking to each other, and falling asleep. Wishing to avoid this last, I pulled the plug. C minus.

(1997) Ossos/ Bones (In Portuguese with English subtitles) DRAMA/ SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Produced, written and directed by Pedro Costa, the first of three "Fontainhas" trilogy that centers on two adult sisters of Clotilde (Vanda Duarte) who has a daughter, Maura of her own, who at times lives with her sister, Tina (Mariya Lipkina) who has suicidal tendencies both sometimes cook or work as cleaning ladies. Tina unwillingly gives up her baby to her deadbeat and struggling father, (Nuno Vaz). The father eventually comes across a kind nurse, Eduarda Gomes (Isabel Ruth) who eventually helps the father and the mother Tina with her salary.

Expressionless and emotionless movie that is reminiscent to Carl Theodor Dreyer and Theodoros Angelopoulos to Aki Kaurismäki to name a few.

In the dingy Fontainhas slum of Lisbon, the occupants sleepwalk through impoverished lives. A depressed girl gives birth and abandons the infant to its deadbeat father. He doesn't know what to do with a child. A sympathetic nurse tries to help them out, but he seems incapable of understanding charity.

In the first of three movies about the occupants of the dead-end life, Pedro Costa shows us them doing..... very little about their situation. They don't talk. They don't seem to think. They barely react. Costa is clearly trying to force the audience into seeing them and understanding them, but it's hard to elicit sympathy for some one who doesn't seem self-aware enough to ask for anything. Is Costa, like Chantal Akerman, trying to impress on the audience the dreary dullness, the meaningless life of the truly impoverished? Possibly. Certainly I have the same reaction as to Akerman's works: if they don't care, why should I?

Before watching this film, and because of what I had been reading about it on the Internet, I thought it was an attempt to capture the feeling of decadence present in the city of Lisbon and its surroundings (if you have been there you know what I mean). But then I saw it. And understood that in a way I was right... it is an attempt, it does not mean that the director was capable of doing so.

The so called "slow movies" or "long shot sequences" cannot, alone, produce a film. "Ossos" seems to be just that, just a bunch of long shots filmed in an extremely slow pace trying to be - by itself - an art-movie. There is here no connection at all between form and content.

The feeling I got from watching this was that anyone could have made the film. No idea was needed, and no money for production I am sure. You just need to film a couple of people staring at the walls, with no script at all, with some shouting in the background.

It is almost impossible to debate this film as it is completely empty as a film. OK, we can discuss the content but as a representation of a piece of reality, leading us the a discussion about something independent from the movie itself. But the film is just that: a big ZERO.