Director / photography: Pedro Casta
Editors: Dominique Auvray, Patricia Saramago
Cast: Vanda Duarte, Lena Duarte, Zita Duarte, Manuel Gomes Miranda, Diogo Pires Miranda, Evangeline Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Antonio Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, Paulo Jorge Goncalves, Pedro Lanban
Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.
Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.
Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.
Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.
Vanda’s life is isolated but she often has visitors, sharing the foil and lighters and carrying on gossipy conversations about family and troubles and such. The walls in her room have been painted green, or maybe she found the room that way. It creates an ambience that is at once warm and sickening, underlined by Vanda’s constant coughing. She seems to stay in bed most of the time. The movie spends a lot of time there with her, as per the title, but Costa’s camera also goes off a-wandering, capturing the sad freakshow of poverty, the babies and the stockpiles of food from who knows where and all the make-do fixups for furniture and storage. Some of these folks are fastidiously tidy, pushing back the chaos. Others just live in it. The picture grows meditative, with more ASMR effects, but “meditative” also feels inappropriate to what we are seeing. The cognitive dissonance gnaws constantly over the runtime of nearly three hours.
One of the more interesting documentary aspects of the picture, as long as we’re going to look so remorselessly at slow-motion self-destruction, is seeing how the drugs work on them, changing their behavior subtly as they grow high and contented and absurdly confident and happy for brief moments. The tides of quiet, focused desperation crash the party over and over. For example, evidently low on drugs, Vanda turns to the phonebook where she has cut drugs in the past, going page by page scraping up minute particles of powder with a razor blade. Onto the foil, click-click the lighter. Another funny, sad scene shows the problem of using up lighters and never throwing them away because you think there might be enough fluid, if you leave it to settle, for one or two more flickering flames.
I can’t say I like this movie—I’m not sure how anyone could. But it can be admired, or something. I like Costa’s spirit of just picking up the camera and shooting—he takes the fly-on-the-wall Frederick Wiseman approach. I’m surprised in a way that Costa didn’t edit it too, it’s all so raw and yet self-possessed. And I like the way it dwells on the things related to grinding poverty that no one wants to even look at. That’s a pretty big piece of what makes this movie hard to look at—the things it shows. Unfortunately it also has approximately nil narrative momentum. We get to know various people besides Vanda—some of her family, many of her neighbors. We see and hear of their plights and constant harassments—living quarters demolished without warning, sudden deaths, the insane constantly shifting conditions under which they live. But there’s very little continuity and not many discernible through-lines.
I got the feeling In Vanda’s Room was approached more as a documentary than Costa’s next picture, Colossal Youth (which I agonized over a year or two ago). The 2006 Colossal Youth seemed to be trying more for narrative cohesion. Costa took a writing credit on that one for a reason. He doesn’t take one here. As it turns out Colossal Youth was the third and In Vanda’s Room the second in Costa's so-called Fontainhas trilogy, which started in 1997 with Ossos, a more sedate 98 minutes. I haven’t seen it—I just figured out it’s a trilogy. They are all focused on the Fontainhas slum district of Lisbon. Both In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth left me exhausted and numbed. It’s not necessarily what I want from seeing a movie, but I can’t deny there’s a certain amount of power just in that itself. Approach with caution.
One of the more interesting documentary aspects of the picture, as long as we’re going to look so remorselessly at slow-motion self-destruction, is seeing how the drugs work on them, changing their behavior subtly as they grow high and contented and absurdly confident and happy for brief moments. The tides of quiet, focused desperation crash the party over and over. For example, evidently low on drugs, Vanda turns to the phonebook where she has cut drugs in the past, going page by page scraping up minute particles of powder with a razor blade. Onto the foil, click-click the lighter. Another funny, sad scene shows the problem of using up lighters and never throwing them away because you think there might be enough fluid, if you leave it to settle, for one or two more flickering flames.
I can’t say I like this movie—I’m not sure how anyone could. But it can be admired, or something. I like Costa’s spirit of just picking up the camera and shooting—he takes the fly-on-the-wall Frederick Wiseman approach. I’m surprised in a way that Costa didn’t edit it too, it’s all so raw and yet self-possessed. And I like the way it dwells on the things related to grinding poverty that no one wants to even look at. That’s a pretty big piece of what makes this movie hard to look at—the things it shows. Unfortunately it also has approximately nil narrative momentum. We get to know various people besides Vanda—some of her family, many of her neighbors. We see and hear of their plights and constant harassments—living quarters demolished without warning, sudden deaths, the insane constantly shifting conditions under which they live. But there’s very little continuity and not many discernible through-lines.
I got the feeling In Vanda’s Room was approached more as a documentary than Costa’s next picture, Colossal Youth (which I agonized over a year or two ago). The 2006 Colossal Youth seemed to be trying more for narrative cohesion. Costa took a writing credit on that one for a reason. He doesn’t take one here. As it turns out Colossal Youth was the third and In Vanda’s Room the second in Costa's so-called Fontainhas trilogy, which started in 1997 with Ossos, a more sedate 98 minutes. I haven’t seen it—I just figured out it’s a trilogy. They are all focused on the Fontainhas slum district of Lisbon. Both In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth left me exhausted and numbed. It’s not necessarily what I want from seeing a movie, but I can’t deny there’s a certain amount of power just in that itself. Approach with caution.
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