The sin (and atonement) of Pedro Costa

Above, from Ossos (1997)

I sup­pose before going into Costa’s sin I ought to con­fess my own, which is that I walked out of the first Cannes press screen­ing of Colossal Youth back in 2006, about forty-five minutes in. I admit I was a bit sus­pi­cious of it, not quite sure if the film, which was fol­low­ing the wan­der­ings of a clearly “authen­t­ic” dis­placed per­son named Ventura, was going to turn out to be one of those smirky, “Hey, look at me, I’m using real dis­pos­sessed people to artic­u­late my ‘vis­ion,’ and does­n’t that make you uncom­fort­able, you bour­geois twat? Boo-yah, in your FACE!” exer­cises that reached a kind of apo­theosis with Ulrich Seidl’s loathe­some Import/Export, which was to screen at Cannes the next year, and which I stub­bornly sat through the entirety of for the sole pur­pose of being able to fully own my con­tempt for it. There was a qual­ity to it that sug­ges­ted it would be some­thing rather dif­fer­ent than that…but whatever it was, at that par­tic­u­lar moment in time, I was­n’t in the mood for it (it was early even­ing, I was hungry, and the pic­ture was going to go on for about anoth­er two hours), and I bolted. That I did so at pretty much the same time as anoth­er more prom­in­ent crit­ic did actu­ally filled me with an ambi­val­ence that con­tained more than a dol­lop of shame.

Over the next year I learned a lot more about the Portuguese film­maker, and was able to catch up with the work at an August 2007 ret­ro­spect­ive at Anthology Film Archives. Colossal Youth, as it hap­pens, was the final part of a tri­logy of films Costa began mak­ing in the late 1990s, after mak­ing a pic­ture called Casa de Lava on the island of Cape Verde.  It was from the res­id­ents of that island that Costa learned of Fontinhas, a poor area out­side of Lisbon prop­er, where many of the res­id­ents of the island wound up after emig­rat­ing to Lisbon in the hopes of chan­ging their lives. Costa was already a film­maker of remark­able sens­it­iv­ity and sens­ib­il­ity when he began shoot­ing Ossos in Fontinhas, but work­ing there would wind up trans­form­ing him profoundly.

I dis­cuss some of this in my review of the extraordin­ary Second Run DVD of Costa’s 1989 debut fea­ture O Sangue, which appeared as a Foreign Region DVD Report at The Auteurs’ Notebook in autumn of last year. In that piece, I refer to what I’ll call Costa’s “sin” here. The new Criterion release of Costa’s tri­logy, an extraordin­ary box set entitled “Letters From Fontinhas: Three Films By Pedro Costa” gives one the oppor­tun­ity to exam­ine it more closely, and to appre­ci­ate the ways in which Costa adap­ted his approach to his sub­ject and subjects.

Like the sub­sequent In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, the cast of Ossos is made up largely of real Fontinhas res­id­ents, but unlike the sub­sequent films, the non-actors are play­ing roles and enact­ing a story con­cocted by Costa. None of this is par­tic­u­larly both­er­some or prob­lem­at­ic. Late in the film there’s a scene in which the char­ac­ter Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), an out­sider, enters the labyrinth of Fontinhas to vis­it Tina (Maria Lipkina). Who is listen­ing, on a boom box, to a live record­ing of the British punk group Wire, play­ing its song “Lowdown” (chor­us: “Drowning in the big swim/rising to the SUR-FACE!”). The boom box is switched off; the char­ac­ters com­mune; the fath­er of Tina’s child enters the frame; words are exchanged; and the music begins again. Only this time the “Lowdown” we hear is the stu­dio ver­sion from the sem­in­al album Pink Flag.

The prob­lem here isn’t that the music is inapt; ton­ally, it “works” with the scene. The verisimil­it­ude issue is a little more per­tin­ent; the like­li­hood that in the late 1990s a young woman liv­ing in a Lisbon slum is going to be listen­ing to the 1977 work of a British band is, well, iffy. But not entirely out of the realm of the prob­able. That the view­er hears two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the song, though, starts to smack of a certain…connoisseurship. (And indeed, Costa has spoken of his deep admir­a­tion for the group, and its influ­ence on his aes­thet­ic.) And here we get to the nub of Costa’s error. Whether or not the music “works,” it still rep­res­ents a sort of dir­ect­ori­al impos­i­tion. There’s a false­ness to it that’s essen­tial, that goes bey­ond mere ques­tions of cine­mat­ic verisimilitude.

In an video inter­view with the film­maker Jean-Pierre Gorin that makes up just one of the volu­min­ous extras in the extraordin­ary Criterion set, Costa recalled being upbraided by one of Ossos’ cast mem­bers, Vanda Duarte, who told him “You have to stop the fak­ing.” She was­n’t refer­ring to the use of music, neces­sar­ily (Costa does­n’t men­tion a spe­cif­ic instance of fak­ing that Duarte objec­ted to), but Costa got the mes­sage. Hence, the straits of In Vanda’s Room, an epic film that largely takes place in the title dwell­ing, where Duarte and her sis­ter Zita con­sume drugs and gos­sip as their neigh­bor­hood is torn down around them. This non-fiction fic­tion (the pro­duc­tion pro­cess of the digitally-shot pic­ture was incred­ibly painstak­ing, exact­ing, and again, this is covered in the box’s sup­ple­ments) seems to eschew the influ­ence of a sens­ib­il­ity “out­side” of it, at least until the Gyorgy Kurtag music that plays over the end cred­its. (In an essay in the box’s book­let, Thom Andersen cites the per­haps “pseudodie­get­ic sound” of a song by French chanteuse and one time yé-yé girl Nicoletta that opens the film, which to these ears soun­ded like some­thing that could have been com­ing from some European mani­fest­a­tion of oldies radio.)

Ventura in Colossal Youth, 2006

By the time he made Colossal Youth, Costa had become so famil­i­ar with Fontinhas—which, as it hap­pens, was being pretty much wiped out as he was mak­ing his films—that he could com­fort­ably re-integrate his sens­ib­il­ity into that film. Hence, then, the pic­ture’s English-language title (a nod to anoth­er sem­in­al record­ing the 1980 record by the Welsh group Young Marble Giants) and lead “act­or” Ventura’s obsess­ive, incan­tory recitation/adaptation of a letter/poem by sur­real­ist and French Resistance mar­tyr Robert Desnos. Ventura’s poignant, strangely magis­teri­al pres­ence is so potent that he can be seen as the pic­ture’s defin­it­ive co-auteur. It is rather iron­ic that Fontinhas comes down just as Costa becomes a film­maker whose soul has finally mel­ded with the place.