By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 3, 2007
The Portuguese film “Colossal Youth” was one of the most fascinating competition entries at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. To judge by the noisy walkouts during its press screening, it was also one of the most disliked — although the truer word might be misunderstood. Beautifully photographed, this elliptical, sometime confounding, often mysterious and wholly beguiling mixture of fiction and nonfiction looks and sounds as if it were made on another planet. And, in some respects, it was.
Directed by Pedro Costa, whose earlier work I’m woefully unfamiliar with, “Colossal Youth” is something of a rarity, at least in the context of contemporary cinema. A work of cinematic art rather than a work of industrial or commercial art, it resists easy consumption. Its episodic narrative, which Mr. Costa developed with his nonprofessional cast and shot in digital video, unfolds as a series of seemingly disconnected encounters. Things happen, people talk, as in real life, but without the crutch of a plot. A man identified only as Ventura moves through rooms and streets visiting men and women who may or may not be his children. They call him “Papa,” smoke, eat, tell stories, live. It’s as simple as that, even if it’s also complex.
This complexity is revealed slowly over the course of 155 deliberate minutes. Mr. Costa’s long, generally static takes, most of which last a few minutes though a few run closer to 10, are themselves kinds of rooms, spaces that you can examine at your leisure and settle into. The actual rooms alternate between the atmospherically derelict and the anonymously pristine, though all are gorgeously lighted as if a direct invocation of Vermeer. Ventura, who’s seen in the opening throwing furniture from an upper-story window in a dilapidated building, doesn’t belong to any of these rooms. His wife has left him after inexplicably attacking him with a knife. Having long ago left Cape Verde to work in Portugal, Ventura is again a man without a home.
The caressing lighting and the profusion of low angles — which finds the camera sometimes pointing up at Ventura, who looms in the frame like a statue — impart beauty as well as a sense of classicism. Long and loose-limbed, with a patchy gray beard and hair as thin as a worn carpet, Ventura looks poor (“Laborer, retired,” he explains curtly), but he seems touched by grace, even nobility. Mr. Costa flirts dangerously here with turning his characters into exotics, with making their misery seem somehow ennobling, as some accuse Dorothea Lange of doing in her photographs of sharecroppers. But he never strays down that path, perhaps because the people in this movie are as much his collaborators as his subjects.
Mr. Costa doesn’t offer any of the usual guidelines; you just follow Ventura on his journey. There are no time stamps or other such obvious aids to let you know where you are geographically (Lisbon); the clothes and buildings look modern, but only when a man says “Nov. 1, 2001,” do you learn when any of this takes place. Yet even after this apparently casual announcement, a sense of floating in some undefined moment in time persists. And, as it turns out, though most of the movie is indeed set in the present, a handful of scenes are set in the past, which I learned only after I read an article about Mr. Costa. That vagueness might seem frustrating, but it actually adds to the movie’s pleasurable mystery.
Ambiguity is rarely valued in movies anymore, at least for those in commercial release. The recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have been, among other things, a painful reminder of how few genuinely novel, aesthetically and intellectually challenging films reach American movie houses. Our theaters are filled with junk, our heads too. Newspapers and blogs crunch box-office numbers far more than they engage in discussions about the art. Moviegoers interested in serious work are forced to look to festivals, but even then there’s no guarantee that the programmers will fill that particular niche. Cannes, among other festivals, showed “Colossal Youth”; the New York Film Festival gave it a pass.
All hail, then, Anthology Film Archives for giving “Colossal Youth” its American theatrical premiere, as well as for its retrospective of Mr. Costa’s work that starts today. The retrospective includes five other features, some of which involve a few of the people you meet in “Colossal Youth,” like Vanda, who appears in the earlier film “In Vanda’s Room” (2000). A former addict whose drugs of choice are now methadone and beer, Vanda has a scraping cough and a mesmerizing storytelling style; in “Colossal Youth” she turns her experiences of giving birth into an epic. She plays one of Ventura’s many children in the new movie, though she’s also playing herself. Either way, it is an amazing performance.
