Director/writer: Pedro Costa
Photography: Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simoes
Music: Nuno Carvalho, Os Tubaroes
Editor: Pedro Filipe Marques
Cast: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Cila Cardoso, Alberto “Lento” Barros
When it came time to look again at Colossal Youth, which I saw first maybe 10 years ago, I found I had virtually no memory of it. Alas this is not unusual. For a long time I had good habits of looking at movies most days—at least six days a week, and some of those occasions were double or even triple features. At some point, however, I realized I was not always retaining that much of them. But I kept blazing through anyway—second impressions often remain clarifying. So it was not entirely surprising not to have even a vague impression of Colossal Youth. But as soon as I put it on I saw the problem right away. There are very few helpful handholds in this long and very slow picture.
In fact, I’m not even sure now exactly what it’s about. Or maybe I should say, my main sense of what it’s about comes not from watching it (twice now at last count) but from reading about it on the internet. There you find it likened to documentary, chiefly I guess because most of the players are amateurs possibly playing themselves and the picture is focused on the fallout of a Portuguese coup in the ‘70s. It appears to be scripted rather than improvised. The best evidence may be that director Pedro Costa also takes a writing credit, but the action mostly feels performed. The picture consists largely of long takes, often shot in long and with darkness or light poured over like spilled paint. The dialogue is unfocused, oblique, and repetitive, but the talk revolves around poverty, drug use, attempts to salvage ghetto housing projects gone to ruin. Colossal Youth is another one that premiered at Cannes and saw a lot of people walking out.
When it came time to look again at Colossal Youth, which I saw first maybe 10 years ago, I found I had virtually no memory of it. Alas this is not unusual. For a long time I had good habits of looking at movies most days—at least six days a week, and some of those occasions were double or even triple features. At some point, however, I realized I was not always retaining that much of them. But I kept blazing through anyway—second impressions often remain clarifying. So it was not entirely surprising not to have even a vague impression of Colossal Youth. But as soon as I put it on I saw the problem right away. There are very few helpful handholds in this long and very slow picture.
In fact, I’m not even sure now exactly what it’s about. Or maybe I should say, my main sense of what it’s about comes not from watching it (twice now at last count) but from reading about it on the internet. There you find it likened to documentary, chiefly I guess because most of the players are amateurs possibly playing themselves and the picture is focused on the fallout of a Portuguese coup in the ‘70s. It appears to be scripted rather than improvised. The best evidence may be that director Pedro Costa also takes a writing credit, but the action mostly feels performed. The picture consists largely of long takes, often shot in long and with darkness or light poured over like spilled paint. The dialogue is unfocused, oblique, and repetitive, but the talk revolves around poverty, drug use, attempts to salvage ghetto housing projects gone to ruin. Colossal Youth is another one that premiered at Cannes and saw a lot of people walking out.
But it has its defenders too, such as Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, who wrote (via Wikipedia) that it is "misunderstood": "Beautifully photographed, this elliptical, sometime confounding, often mysterious and wholly beguiling mixture of fiction and nonfiction [there’s that sense of it again as semi-documentary] looks and sounds as if it were made on another planet. And, in some respects, it was."
It seemed to me not so much extraterrestrial as depressingly familiar, a display of how we live, specifically showing how the grind of poverty, neglect, and abuse produces a way of life no one wants to even look at, including many viewers of this picture, let alone acknowledge as reality or attempt to address. I kept waiting for something to happen in Colossal Youth but perhaps the point is that for the poor nothing ever happens, and nothing ever changes.
As for being beautiful I don’t see that either, except in some abstracted ways. The shots feel organic and they are often artfully composed. I admired particularly the way darkness was used as a kind of erasing element. But in general I was so frustrated with trying to figure out what was going on from scene to scene that I wasn’t inclined to give the picture much credit. I tried. I watched the whole thing. I stopped and rewound when things confused me. It took me considerably longer than the running time of over two and a half hours to actually get through all of it. I still can’t say there’s much there except perhaps for a Portuguese audience who lived through the coup 50 years ago and its aftermath.
One element that persists is a letter the main character Ventura is composing verbally to a lost lover. It may never be committed to paper, let alone sent, but Ventura rehearses it over and over and it finally becomes a kind of rhythmic device, a kind of poem forming. I’m willing to call that part of Colossal Youth beautiful. I made myself useful and transcribed the most complete version, which occurs in a murmuring speech near the end, and made a helpful contribution to IMDb by adding it to the skimpy quotes page there for this movie. Remember, this or parts of it are heard all through the movie over and over:
Nha cretcheu, my love, meeting again will brighten our lives for at least 30 years. I’ll return to you renewed and full of strength. I wish I could offer you 100,000 cigarettes, a dozen fancy new dresses, a car, that little lava house you always dreamed of, and a 40-cent bouquet. But most of all, drink a bottle of good wine and think of me. The work here never stops. There are over a hundred of us now. Two days ago, on my birthday, I thought about you for a long while. Did my letter arrive safely? Still no word from you. I’m still waiting. Every day, every minute, I learn beautiful new words just for you and me, tailor-made for us both like fine silk pajamas. I can only send you one letter a month. Still no word from you. Maybe soon. Sometimes I get scared building these walls, me with a pick and cement, you with your silence, pushing you even deeper into a pit of forgetting. It hurts to see these things I don’t want to see. Your lovely hair slips through my fingers like dry grass. Sometimes I feel weak and think I’ll forget.
It seemed to me not so much extraterrestrial as depressingly familiar, a display of how we live, specifically showing how the grind of poverty, neglect, and abuse produces a way of life no one wants to even look at, including many viewers of this picture, let alone acknowledge as reality or attempt to address. I kept waiting for something to happen in Colossal Youth but perhaps the point is that for the poor nothing ever happens, and nothing ever changes.
As for being beautiful I don’t see that either, except in some abstracted ways. The shots feel organic and they are often artfully composed. I admired particularly the way darkness was used as a kind of erasing element. But in general I was so frustrated with trying to figure out what was going on from scene to scene that I wasn’t inclined to give the picture much credit. I tried. I watched the whole thing. I stopped and rewound when things confused me. It took me considerably longer than the running time of over two and a half hours to actually get through all of it. I still can’t say there’s much there except perhaps for a Portuguese audience who lived through the coup 50 years ago and its aftermath.
One element that persists is a letter the main character Ventura is composing verbally to a lost lover. It may never be committed to paper, let alone sent, but Ventura rehearses it over and over and it finally becomes a kind of rhythmic device, a kind of poem forming. I’m willing to call that part of Colossal Youth beautiful. I made myself useful and transcribed the most complete version, which occurs in a murmuring speech near the end, and made a helpful contribution to IMDb by adding it to the skimpy quotes page there for this movie. Remember, this or parts of it are heard all through the movie over and over:
Nha cretcheu, my love, meeting again will brighten our lives for at least 30 years. I’ll return to you renewed and full of strength. I wish I could offer you 100,000 cigarettes, a dozen fancy new dresses, a car, that little lava house you always dreamed of, and a 40-cent bouquet. But most of all, drink a bottle of good wine and think of me. The work here never stops. There are over a hundred of us now. Two days ago, on my birthday, I thought about you for a long while. Did my letter arrive safely? Still no word from you. I’m still waiting. Every day, every minute, I learn beautiful new words just for you and me, tailor-made for us both like fine silk pajamas. I can only send you one letter a month. Still no word from you. Maybe soon. Sometimes I get scared building these walls, me with a pick and cement, you with your silence, pushing you even deeper into a pit of forgetting. It hurts to see these things I don’t want to see. Your lovely hair slips through my fingers like dry grass. Sometimes I feel weak and think I’ll forget.
I tip my hat to anyone who can sit through this movie twice.
ReplyDeleteTook me twice to come around w/ The Battle of Chile (263 minutes!) but you have to draw the line somewhere!
ReplyDeleteI love The Battle of Chile, although I never did see Part III.
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing is on my list to get to too. Hope I like it the first time!
ReplyDelete