“I think that Costa is genuinely great.”- Jacques Rivette
The critical success of Pedro Costa's COLOSSAL YOUTH, one of the best reviewed films of the past year, might finally secure the Portuguese director belated recognition here. A frustrating mystery of North American film culture has been the persistent disregard in every film savvy centre for a director long recognized in Europe and Asia as a major auteur. This important retrospective then acts as both primer and corrective, introduction and redress - and if that sounds a little overblown, be assured that Costa's cinema deserves the most passionate advocacy.
There have been few more prodigious debuts than Pedro Costa's O SANGUE. One of those first films that feels like the unleashing of pent-up forces - long nurtured visual ideas, banked homages to favourite films and directors, a romanticism unseen since early Leos Carax - O SANGUE was also something of a false start, in the sense that its dreamy, nocturnal tone, conspicuous cinephilia, and showboating camera work did not establish Costa's true path, which was towards a spare, materialist cinema. That perhaps was not apparent in his followup film, CASA DE LAVA, which invoked STROMBOLI and Tourneur's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, but in his subsequent “Vanda trilogy,”with which COLOSSAL YOUTH concludes, this dreamy, allusive approach gave way to a consciously Bressonian style - elliptical editing, lack of establishing shots, no non-diegetic music, inexpressive nonprofessional actors delivering flat, uninflected line readings, sound employed to replace image and to suggest an offscreen world, and a precise, materialist treatment of objects, bodies, and space - which Costa applied to a decidedly unBressonian subject and setting: the forlorn lives of the inhabitants of the slums of Estrela d'Africa and Las Fontainhas in Lisbon.
In OSSOS, the first film in the trilogy, Costa's love for Bresson is everywhere apparent - tight shots of hands, locks, and doorways, the camera sometimes held for a beat or two after a figure has departed the frame, offscreen sound to suggest contiguous space - and like Bresson's films, OSSOS is more sensual than ascetic. The soulful close-ups Costa accords his abject characters verge on the
|
 |
|