Synopsis
A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.
Vitalina Varela
2019 Directed by Pedro Costa
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i’ll get 9 hours of sleep and have a large iced coffee and *still* pass the fuk out during a pedro costa
(i say this with love)
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"I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theatre. Some films have made me doze off in the theatre, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks." - Abbas Kiarostami
Vitalina Varela is despairing, hyper-slow cinema. To watch this after a weary day crushes the soul. Yet it sticks, burying itself into your darkest contemplations. It is a film of faithless faith, days as dark as the night, and a character sketched entirely by his absence. It is 2 hours of a woman's inner suffering, soaking in secrets and lies, darkness and eventually nothing.
Vitalina Varela passes…
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Portugal's submission for Best International Feature Film at 2021 Oscars.
Watched Academy Screener
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Vitalina and her ghost. Haunted places at Lisbon. Cinema makes material a world unseen and finds in them new myths. There isn’t many big emotions in 2019 cinema than the moment at the cemetery when we can see a clear daylight sky.
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As often the case that Pedro Costa makes a film that it's received with similar, repetitive platitudes and hyperbole, like "it's about ghosts" or something, while not necessarily off the mark in terms of quality, this is often what happens when a filmmaker is lucky enough to make a work over several years and not within the traditional film production model (no matter the social/cultural contingent) - it's difficult to translate what's usually 3, 4 times the amount of what's contained in an average film within the same time frame you'd have to write about the average movie. But Vitalina Varela posed a different challenge - or rather, it became harder to write about, because it's the first of Costa's…
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passing on a rating because this is my first costa and i understand this is an expansion on his previous works so there's likely context im missing for a better assessment but nonetheless i found the way this tries to recreate a person (and history) through detailed observation of the spaces and people they've left behind in their wake rather moving.
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you know that moment where you just wake up? and the realities of life haven’t quite sunk in, you’re immersed in the memories of what it was like to be asleep, whatever dreams roamed around in your mind. you’re conscious of your awake self but numb to the world around you, not sure what exactly is real and what is a consequence of the dreams lingering with you. anyway, that’s Vitalina Varela for the entirety of the runtime. watch this movie tired and lose your entire grasp on reality. ghosts coated in shadows, confusion over lies and loss reflected as literal urban decay, the spaces representative of all the grief haunting her existence. she’s caught between the realm of the awake and the asleep, the alive and the dead. and we’re trapped for the ride through the underworld besides her until she finds the light, wherever that may be. staggering work.
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Costa continues the transformation he began to effect on his own cinema in Horse Money, reshaping the slums of Lisbon from a realistically understood and concretized space into an oneiric nightmare suspended in the inhospitable threshold between the trauma of history and the myriad personal traumas of the dispossessed residents. shoddy cement structures rise like crooked tombstones and reach into what seems to be an eternal darkness, while the lines between interior and exterior disintegrate, each building seemingly bleeding into other spaces even as ghosts from without inevitably penetrate them. but Vitalina herself refuses to be cowed by spirits: her continued existence seems as much for the sake of redressing the sins of men as for her own sake. she…
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Fuck sleep clinics, the only thing your insomnia needs is a Pedro Costa. A beautiful cure.
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Vitalina Varela, titled after its leading protagonist and co-writer, discerns the Portuguese fifty-five-year-old woman portraying an interpretation of herself, and it's a mostly silent performance were recollections of an earlier time come to be central to the present as she arrives in nothing but her bare feet to the slum where her late husband made his home. It largely circumvents narrative with the fundamental objective being to exist with Vitalina, as she confronts the state of living her husband possessed while sharing heartfelt announcements of a reality they once shared.
Pedro Costa directs with a particular and purposeful pace which unfurls without any urgency with an accentuation bestowed to light and shadows as well as alleyways filled with the scattered…
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Build your house well... and remember to look to the still day-lit sky when the shadows grow too deep here on the ground.
An expressionistic melancholy spell. Painstakingly composed and beautifully lit. The texture and hues of the images are remarkable.
The images do very little of the storytelling beyond place, space, and tone. The story itself is almost completely orally told. Even then, words emerge after long ambient soundscapes of unseen "slum life" always just happening beyond the image's frames or on the other side of walls.
Whether it's day or night, it's almost always pitch, with pinpoint spotlighting illuminating only parts of this desolate world and the striking faces that occupy it. Most of the image is in…
