HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS

“When Vitalina played her part in Horse Money, where she tells the story of her arrival in Lisbon, I had the immediate feeling that she could go much further, and she wanted to, even if only to occupy herself. She was not afraid of this work; she gave it her all, body and soul.”

EARLY IN PEDRO COSTA’S 2014 FILM HORSE MONEY, a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina recounts in detail the heartrending story of her late arrival to her estranged husband’s funeral in Lisbon. It’s an unforgettable moment in a film that, while centered primarily on Costa’s frequent lead Ventura, announced an unexpectedly vital new figure in the Portuguese director’s work. Indeed, five years on, it’s Vitalina’s presence and performance that linger most in the mind. Costa’s new feature, Vitalina Varela, returns to this story, dramatizing Vitalina’s arrival in an impoverished Lisbon neighborhood and her painful process of reconciling the memory of her husband with the man she learns led a duplicitous life in her absence.

Since inaugurating a radical form of collaborative nonfiction with In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006), Costa has been developing this approach into a new kind of dramatic portraiture, with Ventura and now Vitalina as his primary creative partners and subjects. Still guided by the spirit of the old Hollywood and modernist masters (John Ford, Jacques Tourneur, Jean-Marie Straub) that so indelibly marked his early colonial allegories O Sangue (1989) and Casa de Lava (1994), Costa has become a touchstone for an entire movement of contemporary art cinema ranging from documentary to the avant-garde. He now enters a new chapter in his influence and profile with Vitalina Varela’s selection by the Sundance Film Festival. But while his hands-on commiseration with Portugal’s downtrodden and dispossessed, as well as his impossibly rich compositional sense, have and will continue to be emulated, his humanism and unwavering dedication to his craft—both pushed to bracing extremes in his latest—have yet to be matched.

At once Costa’s saddest and most spiritual film, employs gradually interlocking story threads to follow both Vitalina as she settles her husband’s affairs and endures the condemnation of his friends and associates, and the plight of a fragile, guilt-ridden priest (played by Ventura), whose vacant church becomes a sanctuary of sorts for these damaged souls. Shot with customary rigor and an increasingly refined and unparalleled sense of space, light, and shadow, the film invests a tragic episode in its heroine’s life with an intimacy and grace that forges new dimensions in Costa’s cinema. Just days before it won the Golden Leopard last summer in Locarno, where Vitalina also picked up the Best Actress prize, Costa and I spoke about the film,