Local premieres of a dozen masterpieces— almost none released in the past 12 months—made 2007 a good movie year.
1. Casa de Lava (1994), Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? (2001), Colossal Youth (2006) I’d only seen one of Pedro Costa’s six features before they came to the Gene Siskel Film Center this year. When I finally saw all of them, the impact of his work astounded me. I prefer Costa’s second film, Casa de Lava (dumbly called Down to Earth in English), maybe because it’s his only landscape film and contains so many other big-screen pleasures and mysteries. But choosing between these three is like trying to compare Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud: your preference will probably depend on which one you’ve seen last. All three of Costa’s films are about outsiders and improvised families, and I can’t think of another contemporary filmmaker who deals with these subjects more passionately. I’m still coming to terms with aspects of Colossal Youth (another dubious English title—the Portuguese original means “Youth on the March”), but these are plainly the kinds of works one comes to know like close friends over the span of years.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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parece-me importante o sublinhado, isto acontece com muitos dos grandes autores...
