Sketches for a cinema of exhaustion
PEDRO COSTA: COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006)
Oscar:
I don't want you to delete your post about Colossal Youth replying to my review. Why would that be in order? I simply contend that I am not attacking your point of view, and therefore a refutation wasn't really necessary. A reply was certainly quite justified. I will quote your post, so that it will stand.
Oscar Jubis writes:I am sorry that you moved to delete your post before I even finished editing my reply to it. (I might have toned down what I said too--that's one function of my self-editing. But now I'll have to let what I said originally stand, since you even quoted my most annoying remark.)Of all the films I've seen this year, including 67 films at Florida festivals, Colossal Youth is the one I can't seem to get out of my mind.
It's reassuring to me, as a fan of the film, that it managed to place third on the 2006 Indiewire list of Best Undistributed Films, as voted by mostly American, "alternative press" critics. I think it speaks volumes that Colossal Youth did that without a single screening at American festivals in 2006 (the sole North American screenings took place in Toronto, reportedly at odd hours and with a third reel that was subtitled in French).
Your contention that "Costa offers less to viewers (and conversely perhaps gives them more to do) than almost any filmmaker presenting lives and people" clashes with my experience of the film. Two scenes come to mind in particular: Vanda in her new apartment telling Ventura the story of the birth of her daughter. The tale, delivered in monologue, is so rich it's almost epical, alternatively sad, funny, tragic, absurd, angry, and sublime. Another scene involves Ventura's visit to a man at a Rehabilitation Clinic. The injured laborer tells Ventura about his hopes for a better life, his inability to find more suitable employment, and his disillusionment over a rift with his mother. It's quite eloquent, moving and, more importantly for the purposes of this discussion, extremely nuanced and detailed. At moments like these, it's hard to refer to Colossal Youth as minimalist and hard to see a connection between the film and Beckett's "impoverished vocabulary".
Further enriching the film is certain, perhaps oblique, allusion to Portugal's colonist past and to the current conditions of Costa's characters as a natural extension of the history between Portugal and Cape Verde. This is a crucial aspect of the film that has only been broached, albeit briefly and as far as I know, by Pascal Acquarello:
"For the characters in Colossal Youth, the historical landscape of the Cape Verde islands as barren land, exploited colony, commercial way station, slave port, and leprosaria institution is not a forgotten anecdote, but a suffocating reality that continues to weigh on the collective consciousness of its inhabitants, even in their migration and displacement."
True to Graham Leggett's contention that the festival champions independent work, the SFIFF is showing Colossal Youth three times, twice on weekends, and not at odd hours.
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