Direction: Pedro Costa
Country: Portugal
Under Pedro Costa’s tonally murky direction, Vitalina Varela fictionalizes a real slice of life in a tale marked by bitterness, abandonment, betrayal, and resentment. Over the course of two hours, there’s an infinite sadness and a despairing melancholia spreading at a slow pace, forcing us to look attentively at the feelings of the real-life title character, a 55-year-old woman who travels from her hometown, Cape Verde, to an unattractive neighborhood in Lisbon to meet her dying husband, Joaquim. Unfortunately or not, she was late, and all she finds is a decaying house and lonely souls moving in and out like shadows in the night.
With a unique visual aesthetic, the camera lurks in the darkness, emphasizing surroundings composed of narrow alleys, simplistic interiors with dim lights, strange passageways, and a small church with regular chairs and a dirt floor, where nobody steps on it anymore except for a desolated priest (Ventura) marked by guilt and hopelessness.
For 20 years, Vitalina waited for a plane ticket that would allow her to finally join her husband, but she never heard of Joaquim. He had left the African island without saying goodbye, abandoning Vitalina and the splendid 10-room house he had built for them but never entered. In Portugal, he worked in the construction field, but it turns out that he became lazy like his drunk comrades, got another woman, and started to sell drugs in order to pay for his modest, poorly-planned house and its meager contents.
The film pulls all this together, leaking the revelations slowly and yielding in a mournful, meditative anticlimax with an idiosyncratic approach to expressionism. Costa’s challenging works (In Vanda’s Room; Colossal Youth; Horse Money) are always marked by this agonizing lethargy that penetrates deep in the skin before biting the soul with pinpoint-accuracy. Although Vitalina Varela is not his best film, it feels like a classy lesson in introspective cinema. It’s a relentlessly grim tale of immigration, suffering, and loneliness that deserves to be contemplated.
