‘Vitalina’ a rambling, minimalist masterpiece
Pedro Costa’s awardwinning, minimalist drama “Vitalina Varela” is an austere, Bressonian meditation on lost love, the existence of God, the eternal struggle between men and women and what constitutes a film. If a film is a story with a beginning, middle and end, developed characters and copious dialogue, “Vitalina Varela” is not a film. It is a two-hour, paradoxically often silent, dramatic monologue in which the title character (Cape Verde-born Vitalina Varela) travels from Cape Verde to Portugal after the death of the husband, Joaquim, who abandoned her decades earlier. In Lisbon, Vitalina takes up residence in her husband’s small, broken-down house, where he died in filthy conditions. “Vitalina Varela” could be seen as a variation on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice or “The Odyssey” in which Odysseus dies before returning to Ithaca and Penelope travels to Calypso’s island Ogygia.
Shot on a digital camera, frequently using existing light and non-professional actors, the film, which was co-written by Costa and eponymous leading lady Varela, begins with the shockingly beautiful, almost pitch black shot of
an alleyway in Lisbon, a brick-lined passage through a cemetery on a hill. People in the alley are in fact walking beneath the dead in their earthen resting places above them. Later, there will be a similarly stunning shot of a dark tunnel. The nearby Portuguese-African neighborhood is a shadowy warren — almost a real-life theater set — of alleyways, telephone poles and cement houses with leaking corrugated roofs, roughshod wiring, dubious plumbing and worn and scarred wooden pillars. Shabbiness aside, the lighting is beautiful and the illuminated, almost tactile surfaces sublime.
Like the greatest painters and photographers, Costa finds the divine in the commonplace, if not the hideous. The neighborhood priest (Ventura), whose hands shake uncontrollably, is the film’s Stentor and Greek chorus, albeit a Catholic variation thereof. His tin and cement church is in disarray. He has no congregation and has stopped serving mass. Vitalina’s monologues tell us that she and Joaquim married when they were young, started to build an enviable home and had a thriving farm.
But incomprehensibly, he left Vitalina and fled to Portugal, where he presumably thought he would be better off with another woman. But he instead lived his life among “sad men and drunkards.”
In addition to the Orpheus tale and “The Odyssey,” “Vitalina Varela” evokes the dramas of Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen. Instead of “funeral baked meats,” we get canned tuna consumed before a candlelit, tabletop shrine. A dish of beans, rice and pumpkin seems to transport a homeless Portuguese-African, who forages for food, back to his forgotten homeland. The priest pauses in an alley, his head suddenly and fortuitously haloed. A window frame turns Vitalina into a living portrait. Yes, the pace is sluggish. But Costa with a cheap camera and eye of a master transforms his settings and his characters’ faces into a monumental depiction of life’s relentless loss, pain and struggle.
(“Vitalina Varela” contains mature themes and emotional anguish)