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Leading actress Vitalina Varela: Lost between Cape Verde and Lisbon, between space and time
Photo: Grandfilm
Pedro Costa remains true to his locations and characters.
The director shoots again and again in Lisbon and in the tiny district of Fontainhas, which actually no longer exists because it has been torn down for years.
The same, often puzzling, characters appear again and again in the works of the Portuguese.
Once you get involved with it, you will never forget it.
Vitalina Varela, the title heroine of his new film named after her actress, is such a character.
The 55-year-old already made a haunting appearance in Costa's film "Cavalo Dinheiro" (2014), this time playing a woman who returns to Fontainhas for a tragic occasion.
Her husband, one of those many people who move from Cape Verde to Portugal in order to do a better job there, has died.
When Vitalina arrives at the airport in Lisbon, barefoot, it has been three days since the funeral.
Vitalina is too late.
But she decides to stay in Portugal.
Nevertheless, Cape Verde, once the hub for the slave trade between Africa and America in the middle of the Atlantic, remains in Costa's film.
In many monologues, sometimes presented as if paralyzed, Vitalina reports on how, as a young woman, she and her husband built a house in a very short time.
They worked day and night, Vitalina pregnant, dragging heavy building materials.
The memory of Cape Verde is a ghostly, omnipresent film motif.
Sometimes the viewer is not quite sure where the heroine is, on the archipelago or in Lisbon.
In the constantly reigning night, the impressions mix.
Vitalina's stories tell of a new life in Fontainhas, but the house itself is run down, actually hardly habitable.
Once you crumble something from the ceiling onto your head in the shower.
The difficult living conditions in the poor district have preoccupied Pedro Costa for almost 30 years.
After his second film "Casa de Lava" (1994), which was still set on Cape Verde, he found out about this place while running errands.
A kind of artistic obsession emerged from this.
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Valentina Varela in Costa's film: Awarded at the Locarno Festival
Photo: Grandfilm
Costa and his leading actress received prizes for "Vitalina Varela" at the Locarno festival.
The acting award in particular is remarkable and perhaps also representative of all the other protagonists in Costa's work, almost all of whom are laypeople - and residents of Fontainhas.
But how do viewers fare who are now sitting in the cinema without having perhaps heard anything from this director, let alone seen it?
Who are dealing with a film that is closely intertwined with earlier works, if not based on them.
At best, they succeed in allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by a world in which it is not always clear who is alive and who is dead, what is real and what is not.
People seem to emerge from nowhere and then disappear again.
Vitalina speaks her thoughts in the darkness, in the loneliness.
Misery reigns in the neglected concrete barracks.
And yet the director develops a lot of beauty out of desolation.
The images are razor-sharp and at the same time appear vague.
They don't show the viewer a way.
They suggest a lot.
And not infrequently one asks oneself: When will it finally be light?
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