Colossal Youth

We can find lots of examples like this. Today, yesterday, all along the history of movie making. Did you know that, in its time, "Citizen Kane" was not exactly recognized? We need movies that really dare to go against the "easy thinking" of blockbusters, Borat and others... movies that some people avoid because they feel... bored. Bored??? Why do people think that their boredom is important for the destiny of the world?... Maybe for the destiny of "their" world. But who cares? This is just one of the greatest movies of 2006, a challenge to look at people and places without the boring mediocrity of reality TV. Yes, boring.

Don't look for a plot. Immerse yourself in the sequence of apparently disconnected vignettes. Get to know the main character, Ventura, a Cape Verdean that emigrated to Portugal around 1972; now, retired and still poor.

This is scrambled story telling in slow motion. Often I found myself thinking about Beckett. The dialogs appear irrelevant, having to do with mundane personal life experiences, friends and relatives. These are poorly educated people after all. In fact one better pay close attention to the prate. It is through small revelations and asides in conversations that we pick up the clues to the life of Ventura and those close to him.

The quiet and unpretentious acting, the extended takes, the absence of broad movements, the occasional lengthy silence, all can be soporific. Yet one needs to listen carefully.

The most captivating aspect is what the director and the cameraman did. Each scene is meticulously framed. Except for a couple of simple pans, the camera is invariably fixed. The overall result is like walking through an art museum. Each shot is a painting, the actors sometimes still, sometimes moving in and out of the frame. The naturalistic lighting reminded of paintings by Rembrandt of persons of a certain standing in Dutch society. Here Pedro Costa paints the faces of simple folks in the stark and denuded ambiances of a poor neighborhood. The visual effect is magical.

The actors are not dramatically stressed, except for the principal female role. Her long, inward monologues feel so authentic and natural that I could swear she was acting her own true self. The male actors are stiff placeholders, but don't dismiss what they are saying.

The story plays as a song. There is a refrain in the form of a love letter to a woman left behind in Cape Verde. It is repeated many times throughout. Again pay attention to the words each time as small variations occur with a telling commentary.

The ironic title is delectable.

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.

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.