Film director Jean Luc Godard had said “In the temple of cinema, there are images, light and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple.” Parajanov, the late master filmmaker from Russia, underscored the importance of bright colours and realistic sound, while Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela goes a step further, accentuating darkness, dark skin, and shadows with muted indirect lighting in a “colour” film, aided with natural sound. When you do see bright images in Vitalina Varela, as at the end of the film, it is not just real bright light and colours, it presents a metaphoric change in the film’s narrative structure.
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| The award-winning actress plays herself in the film about herself |
Vitalina Varela
is distinctly different from the Oscar nominees of 2019 or well known commercial films with
renowned actors. Vitalina Varela is
an unusual film with a title that has the name of its lead actress. The film narrates
the real story of its lead actress, a Cape Verdean immigrant arriving without
papers in Portugal following her husband’s demise. (She acquired the formal papers authorizing her stay in Portugal
halfway into the production of this film, several years after her actual arrival.)
Its director Pedro Costa, and his close-knit
committed production team of cinematographer Leonardo Simoes, sound mixers (Joao Gazua and Hugo
Leitao), production manager, and stock actors can be proud of their low-cost final
product that offers higher aesthetic values than the multi-million dollar
products from either Hollywood or Bollywood. It is definitely one of the
remarkable films made in 2019, if not the decade, at least for audiences less
addicted to conventional action and sex that makes a majority of contemporary films make money at the box office. While the film is made by a white
(Caucasian) Portuguese crew, all the characters in Vitalina Varela are dark-skinned
Africans from Cape Verde. Half of a film festival audience viewing Vitalina Varela (in which
this critic was a spectator) walked out of the film screening halfway, while the other half stayed
rooted in their seats right up to the end of the film and stood up to applaud the
film, even though none of the filmmakers were present at the screening. (This critic recalls that in 1979, when an Andrei
Tarkovsky film retrospective was screened in New Delhi, during an international film
festival, some spectators who had paid for their tickets tore up their seats at the Archana theatre where the films were screened in frustration as they could not comprehend or appreciate Tarkovsky's cinema. Today, ironically the same films, are likely to be treated with awe and respect.)
Ms Varela, the lead actress of Vitalina Varela, has little or no acting
experience. She emotes and reconstructs with
staggering dignity the world of her recent widowhood and love for her late husband,
Joachim, who chose to live the demanding life of an immigrant in the Fontainhas sector
of Lisbon, Portugal, for some 25 years, retaining for his memory Ms Varela’s wedding photograph, carefully preserved in a photo frame in his ill-lit, shanty
dwelling. This award-winning performance of the actress is comparable to the
very best in the world, thanks to Costa’s perseverance and extended committed interaction with her developing the film from scratch for several years prior to the shooting of the film.
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| The priest (Ventura) and the widow (Vitalina Varela), in the church without any other worshippers |
The most amazing part of the film Vitalina Varela is that there was no prior written script (just as
in most of Terrence Malick’s films) making
it all the more difficult for Costa to
attract producers. The spoken words are essentially recollections of Ms Varela’s life and her
second interaction in Lisbon with a real Cape Verdean priest (played in the film by Ventura, a
regular actor in several of Costa’s films),
who buried Ms Varela’s husband Joachim, just days before her arrival in
Portugal. The concept of the film itself emerged from Costa’s, his wife’s, and his team’s interactions for 4 years with
Ms Varela. Costa has explained that the film evolved with those extensive interactions
and the award-winning performance Ms Varela was her honest outpouring of grief and loving memories of her husband
who had promised her a palace in Lisbon decades ago, only to find it was a mere
shack, which included some clues left behind in the derelict abode of the late husband’s
recent lover. The evolution of the film has several parallels with the 2019 Brazilian film The Fever, which also was made after its director Maya Werneck Da-Rin's extensive interactions with indigenous Brazilians.
Contemporary Russian maestro Aleksandr Sokurov made unforgettable, poetic films: Mother
and Son (1997) and Father and Son
(2003). Had Sokurov made Vitalina Varela,
he would possibly have titled it
as “Wife and Husband.”
Vitalina Varela is a recounting of real
events of Varela’s arrival in Portugal from Cape Verde island in the Atlantic, off the African continent (and a former Portuguese colonial territory), a few
days after the death and burial of her husband Joachim, originally a
bricklayer, more recently a person who survived by doing odd jobs. Like
Sokurov’s elegiac Mother and Son, Costa’s Vitalina Varela is essentially a
monologue of Vitalina seemingly speaking to her dead husband about her memories
with him, comparing the stone house in Cape Verde they built together decades ago,
with the tin shanty house in Lisbon. The
Lisbon “palace” that Joachim promised her
decades ago that she occupies following Joachim’s passing is a shanty house with a leaking roof.
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| The priest (ventura) metaphorically "carrying the cross on his shoulders": director Costa and cinematographer Simoes at their best |
The only real dialogues in the film are those between the
priest—a real character, a priest of a derelict church in Lisbon, reeling under
his guilt of turning away a busload of Cape Verde Christians, who had approached
him while he was a priest in Cape Verde to baptise a child without proper
papers. The busload of Christians he turned away were killed in a road accident
a short while later and the priest carries that cross of his action of refusing
to baptise the child to this day. Costa’s film brings together two individuals
from Cape Verde, both suffering from recent tragedies, both religious
individuals, both alone in a new country where even God seems to have forsaken
them. One line spoken during the interaction between the two is evocative:
“I had the cross of Christ on my
shoulders. I couldn’t move. When I fell, I was free.” A fascinating
religious commentary, indeed, in a film that did not have a prior written
script.
In Vitalina Varela,
the spoken words are less important than the visuals. A striking point in the film is the arrival
of Vitalina in Lisbon. A plane arrives
on the tarmac of the airport and the sole V.I.P. to emerge from it is Vitalina. The “V.I.P.’s” bare feet are shown as she climbs down the steps from the plane. (A cineaste would
recall the Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s
classic 1960 film When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (with proper shoes) and the inverse relationship of the wet, bare feet shown in Vitalina Varela descending
from the plane in this sequence.) You would expect lights in an airport at night—but the scene is dark, the
person is dark skinned, and wearing clothes appropriate for mourning. The “V.I.P.'s" reception committee are made up of fellow Cape Verdean immigrants working as cleaners/support staff at
the airport, one of whom honestly tells her “Vitalina, my condolences. You are too late.
Your husband’s funeral was 3 days ago.
There is nothing for you in Portugal. His house is not yours. Go back to Cape Verde.”
Some reception for a widow!
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| A rare bright shot in the film is at the grave of Joachim |
Just as Parajanov emphasized light in his films, Costa and
his cinematographer Leonardo Simoes emphasize the importance of light by
erasing it and using it sparingly to accentuate its importance. This is a colour
film that appears to show more black (or lack of light) in most of the
sequences with indirect lighting often behind the actors to give a silhouette. It fits
with its the subject matter—it is a film dealing with death, sorrow,
loneliness, African immigrants struggling to survive in Europe, lack of money
and love. Even in daytime, much of the scenes are shot in shadows. Each of these
dreamlike shots is aesthetically crafted in austere surroundings and a pleasure
to perceive. There are unforgettable sequences
of tired immigrant workers returning home at night, hardly speaking to each
other, in dimly lit streets close to cemeteries. You are reminded of sparse visual
stage settings crafted by playwrights Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco for
their works. And natural sounds and bleak visuals, "speak" as much as humans do in this film.
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| Vitalina interacts with another woman, who has burdens of her own |
Ultimately Vitalina
Varela is a film about a widow and the spoken words are bound to reflect a feminine viewpoint. In a response
to the priest, who has kind words for her dead husband, Vitalina acerbically responds with
criticism that is considerably true ”Men
favour men. When you see a woman’s face in the coffin, you can’t imagine her suffering.”
Suffice it to say that the film captures all this and more.
The citation for the film’s Silver Hugo award at the Chicago
film festival sums it all: “..for
a ravishing and masterful vision between horror and melodrama, spirituality and
desperation that blew the jury all away."
P.S. Vitalina Varela is one of the author’s top 20 films of 2019. Much of the dialogues quoted above are from
memory of a single viewing and are approximations. The film won the Golden
Leopard award for the best film and the Best Actress award at the Locarno Film
Festival; the Silver Hugo Award for the best feature film at the Chicago
International Film Festival; the Best Director, Best Actor and Best
Cinematography Awards at the Mar del Plata Film Festival; the Grand Prize of
the Jury at the La Roche-sur-Yon International Film Festival (France); and the Best
Cinematography Award at the Gijón International Film Festival (Spain). The Brazilian film,
