Colossal Youth (2006)

You hear about a director and feel a strong urge to watch one of their movie. At the same time: reading about a film beforehand is something I try to avoid; I like a film to overwhelm me (or underwhelm me) without being disturbed by thoughts about how the film has been received and understood among critics. Colossal Youth is a film like that - I am happy that I did not read many words about it, and that while watching it, I had no ready interpretation or description to fall back on, no "this is that kind of movie"-type of judgement. I am also happy about the fact that I had people to discuss the film with afterwards: to watch movies is just as much digesting what one has just seen.

I must confess that Colossal Youth is unlike anything I've seen before. But this is interesting: it is a film that reveals quite little about the characters. We get no tidy image of who these people are. The places we see are presented in very specific frames, rather than through grand and conspicuous panoramas. Even the temporal order of events is quite hazy. And having said this, I'd still want to say that Colossal Youth striked me as a very personal film. The film remains mysterious and the people remain quite enigmatic throughout, but I feel engaged by what Costa presents to me, he encourages to stay in my seat, keep calm, and really, really, look and listen. It's a film that requires patience but I never felt that Costa is the kind of director chosing the snail's pace just for the sake of style. I have a hard time imagining colossal youth could have been made in any other way. The static long takes of the film do not aesthetize - we see what we see, and everything is important (just look at the sparse use of color!). (Sounds are equally important: even though we never see anybody working, we hear work, we hear activity, but what we see is people talking, idling away time, longing for another life).

Colossal Youth comprises a series of encounters. A man, Ventura, goes to meet people, some of which he calls his children. It remains unclear whether they are his children. They talk to him. They watch telly. They eat. They smoke. They drink beer. They sit in parks. They tell stories about life. Ventura tries to make his friend write a letter to his wife, a love poem, a wish for a better life. We learn that many of these people are immigrants from Cap Verde. They live in bad housing. Some houses are about to be torn down, or have been demolished. Ventura goes to look at an apartment where all his children could live. These scenes have an almost dream-like character: the sterile whiteness of the uninhabited spaces, the many rooms and the placid real estate agent. It is things like this that matter: where you live, how you live, how you survive. And scenes like these ones also remind us of Costa's singular technique that has very little to do with social realism in the traditional sense.

Costa does not trade in cheap contrasts between the society of the middle class and the society of the outsiders, of the invisible. We see the reality of these people, and that's enough. Their sense of isolation does not need to be emphasized through images of people who live in lavish luxury. The question the film poses is harder than that, we really have to think and judge: in what ways are these people disconnected, how did it happen, how is this state sustained? Costa's use of space to make us understand the character's world is economical, but it works: we look at how people move, how they sit, slope, and we notice the surroundings in a way that is never relegated to a mere backdrop. This is just as much a film about place and space as it is a film the entire cinematography of which is an exploration of space. The film makes us attend to glaringly white walls, derelic staircases, a naked table, the numb light from a lamp, the strange atmosphere of a museum, the vivid colors of nature, even urban nature. But most of all - these locations are not mere geographical points, they are attached emotionally, as spaces of desolation, eviction and suspension, spaces where nothing happens, or when a memory starts to unfold, or space as a space for dreaming, hoping - but also where hope is muted into something else.