Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

MISSIVE IN ACTION: Colossal Youth's Ventura wanders through Lisbon, repeating a letter to his estranged wife. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa (Tue.-Sat., May 6-10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 866-468-7619, ihousephilly.org) Less than two months after International House's Apichatpong Weerasethakul retrospective, cinephiles are preparing to be dazzled again. Over the past several years, Portugal's Pedro Costa has become the darling of a certain highly elevated stratum of festival-going film critics, who went so far as to sport "Vote for Pedro (Pedro Costa, that is)" T-shirts a la Napoleon Dynamite at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, where Costa's Colossal Youth had its unveiling. My own take is slightly less adulatory — the T-shirts, frankly, were kind of itchy — but there's no question that Costa is a visionary whose films offer a strikingly different way, or rather ways, of approaching the art of cinema.

Colossal Youth is Costa's breakthrough hit, if that term can be applied to a two-and-a-half-hour, nearly plotless movie cast with non-actors from the Cape Verde islands. Shot in a Stygian palate on digital video, the movie follows, literally, an elderly Cape Verdean man named Ventura (also the name he is credited by) through the slums of Lisbon, where he pays visits to a wide swath of Portugese men and women he, apparently metaphorically, calls his children. To anyone who will listen, he repeats phrases from a letter to his estranged wife, who leaves him in the opening minutes: "If I could, I would buy you a hundred thousand cigarettes, a dozen of those fancy dresses," and so forth. (The words are taken, uncredited, from a letter by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos.)

Ventura's letter becomes a kind of mystical incantation, but his monomaniacal recapitulation is also extremely funny, a nuance some of Costa's most ardent defenders seem to overlook. There's a tacit assumption that because his movies focus on the very poor and have substantial documentary elements, including onscreen drug use, they must be seen as wrenching depictions of poverty first and foremost. But that is to overlook the beauty of their images, particularly in Colossal Youth, where the degradation of video becomes a kind of impressionistic smear.

The continuing elements of Ossos, In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth (showing Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m.), shot over a period of nine years in the same neighborhoods and using some of the same actors, make them seem like a kind of fictional Up series. But Costa complicates matters: Vanda Duarte, a young heroin addict who more or less plays herself in the latter two movies, appears in Ossos as a character named Clotilde, which is the name of Ventura's wife in Colossal Youth. For many filmmakers (and not a few critics), poverty equals authenticity, but Costa pushes against the boundaries of straightforward representation while simultaneously giving voice to the downtrodden.

The nearly complete retrospective includes all five of Costa's features in chronological order, as well as three shorts and his documentary on the avant-garde polemicists Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet — none of which are available on video in the U.S. It's a major event, and not to be missed.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)