VITALINA VARELA
Shadow play…
Like many great directors, Pedro Costa creates a world of his own – and navigates it at his own pace too. The Portuguese auteur’s latest is solemn to the point of severity, but it reiterates what a distinct register he’s working in. An austere meditation on loss, poverty and existential ennui, its demands on your attention are rewarded in stealthy accretions of quiet potency. You feel as if you’re watching something utterly unique unfold.
Named after its lead actor and character (who also appeared in Costa’s 2015 film Horse Money), Vitalina begins with stooped figures shuffling like zombies down a black passageway. Then it gets darker and slower… Patience is required, then earned as we meet Vitalina, a woman returned from Cape Verde to the Fontainhas slums – Costa’s favoured locale – to bury the husband who deserted her.
As hushed reflections on grief, recrimination and battered belief follow, Costa’s near-ceremonial
CERTIFICATE 12A DIRECTOR Pedro Costa STARRING Vitalina Varela, Ventura, Manuel Tavares Almeida SCREENPLAY Pedro Costa, Vitalina Varela DISTRIBUTOR Second Run RUNNING TIME 125 mins
direction summons a liturgical intensity. Characters sit shrouded in darkness, barely lit, like penitents in eternal confession booths. DoP Leonardo Simões conjures miracles of shadow-drenched, deep-focus suggestion; between the dense images and ominous mood, you could almost call it ‘elevated horror’.
Varela herself is a magnetic presence, matched by Costa regular Ventura as a priest of frail faith. Costa offers no platitudes about grief, instead favouring whispered, questioning poetic asides. Though sometimes too opaque for its own good, the result emerges as an artful reverie on struggle and endurance, heightened to a point of abstraction in which every detail counts: when light or colour are glimpsed, the impact verges on revelatory. Kevin Harley
THE VERDICT
Costa’s stark meditation on death, doubt and deprivation throbs with a controlled, cumulative power.