No Quarto da Vanda is commonly classified as a documentary, which is convenient but hard to countenance. The startling intimacy with which Costa captures his characters—and they are characters, even if they are playing themselves—is hard-won, the result of many rehearsals. Costa befriended and worked with members of the Fontainhas community for many years, and the naturalness and candor with which his “actors” give themselves up to his (small, unobtrusive) camera clearly result from that solidarity. Moments are not stolen but practiced, captured, then organized in a fashion not so far from the narrative ellipses of Ossos; scattered bits of story gradually cohere, become clear, such as the imprisonment of Vanda’s sister Nela, the death of a drug dealer called Geny, the fate of Pedro, an addict who has gone clean. The latter is first seen early in the film, his body tamped tightly into the lower right hand of the frame where he clutches a blaze of red and orange flowers, in a shot that seems inexplicable, arbitrary, unconnected to any other image or story, until he suddenly reappears about an hour later in a long and touching sequence in which he and Vanda discuss their asthma. Few documentaries proceed in such an intentionally fragmentary manner. Costa is also clearly uninterested in any kind of documentary “look” as a fake signifier of authenticity. Working digitally for the first time, which allows freedom but limits precision, Costa labors to ensure that his lighting and compositions are pristine, overtly beautiful: crutches propped against a wall, gleaming in scant light; a naked man washing in the midst of demolition, sheets of steam unfurling from his lanky brown body; a cubist arrangement of two faces, using intersecting mirrors; a poetic montage of deserted rooms; a red plastic bin full of expired lighters nestled in a bright green bag; and a stunning juxtaposition of two blue cubes of light, one a flickering television, the other the open door of a distant room, floating in domestic darkness. Though much gets lost in the gloaming of Costa’s shantytown interiors—faces are sometimes barely discernible in the obscurity—he manages to avoid digital murk, turning a sequence of junkies shooting up by candlelight, for instance, into a lower-depths version of Georges de La Tour.
Still lives: James Quandt on the films of Pedro Costa - page 3 | ArtForum
Posted 1 year ago
