Eh!U Festival 2008: Colossal Youth (Costa, 2006)

The aftermath of this film has been astonishing for me. When it first ended, I thought it was a good film that was well shot, but overlong by over half an hour. Over the last day, my perception of its quality has grown massively. Maybe it is that it is so minimal that it is impossible to not recollect on its gaps and repetitions for clues. Maybe it is the fact that so many people walked out, which usually is a good sign.

Films that I have been to that have had the largest percentage of its audience walk out, in no particular order:

and now Colossal Youth. Granted, all of these except Punch-Drunk Love were in film festivals, where the viewer is trying to cram in as many films per day as possible, and is more likely to give up early on in a film for the sake of cutting his losses. All of these films are exceptional (La Frontiere de L’aube may not be, but most of the walkouts for that took place before the film went off the rails).

So, Colossal Youth. It is difficult to think of a starting point in discussing this, as it is such an elliptical film. There are two huge points that stand out to me: The photography and the doors (lots of doors). Before any of this, though, it seems important that I note that this is my first Pedro Costa film. I understand that his last few films have been sisters to Colossal Youth, introducing characters that play a role in it (especially In Vanda’s Room, the character in which this entire trilogy is named for), and so I look forward to visiting those films and then revisiting this one.

The photography, despite being done in standard definition MiniDV, is brilliant. Consistently evoking Baroque paintings, Costa manages brightness and darkness with video in a way that I have never seen before. Shown in the poster that I put at the top of this entry, the bright sky of the day is rendered black behind blaring white buildings. In the murky grey sheds that many of the characters call home, holes in the ceiling, which have every right to be viewed as unfortunate and problematic because of their allowance for rain to enter into the house, are only portrayed as openings for light to come into the darkness that consumes the space. The middle-aged cast are all the “children” of Ventura, with a range of skin color that is as varied as the light and darkness of most of the shots.

The role of a door is just as much the protagonist of the film as Ventura seems to be. One of the first images of the film is of Ventura’s wife throwing much of his furniture out of their second-floor window, notably a large door. A door ominously drifts shut during a conversation, there are secret passages, a door is completely removed instead of opened, characters wait at doors for long stretches of time, talking into the doorway at a character or characters that we cannot see. In a sense, a door feels pointless in this film, as all of the characters seem to know each other, walk in and out of each other’s homes at will, treat each other like family, and most of all the houses are generally in such bad shape that a door does virtually nothing to prevent someone from entering through any number of crevices, cracks, or holes in the walls and roofs.

The acting is also pretty, even without the knowledge that all of the actors are non-actors who the director found and basically asked to reenact their actual lives in front of the camera (kind of makes this another in the huge trend of semi-documentaries that are showing up). More to come once I see more of Costa’s work.