The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa gazes into the slums around Lisbon and focuses on the misery of the underclass, especially the immigrant community. Perhaps this insufficient description suggests the kind of grainy, handheld style that often passes for gritty authenticity, but Costa’s impoverished landscape is visualized in a series of beautifully composed, carefully lighted images.
Sometimes the rooms and hallways look so artful they seem like science fiction, as though these hard characters and memories had been transported to a cleaner — but hardly happier — world.
This strange combination of style and subject is one reason Costa’s work (notably his 155-minute “Colossal Youth,” from 2006) has been embraced by the festival circuit, but not by audiences in general.
His latest feature, “Horse Money,” is very similar to “Colossal Youth,” including the central presence of an actor known as Ventura. Like many of the people onscreen, Ventura is part of the immigrant population from Cape Verde.
He wanders through the film’s darkened spaces, a haunted figure with hand tremors — a detail Costa focuses on to suggest the ways unresolved issues from the past continue to make themselves known.
There is no storyline, and “the past” is a somewhat slippery concept here. Some scenes may be taking place a few decades ago, others in the present, but Costa isn’t making any of that clear.
Ventura appears to be speaking to people he knew long ago, sorting through a few key events that have haunted them all for years. There is guilt, and sorrow, the specifics of which we don’t really understand. But because of the movie’s rich, painterly darkness, we feel it in our bones.
In the middle of the movie, Costa has a syncopated montage to a piece of music. This comes as a shock, given the film’s otherwise sleepwalking pace, and demonstrates the filmmaker’s range of skills. (Speaking of music, Costa wanted to include song sequences in collaboration with the great Gil Scott-Heron, a tantalizing concept that died when Scott-Heron did.)
“Horse Money” doesn’t sustain the trance-like state that “Colossal Youth” conjured up; for me there are a few too many times when it seems simply and sleepily opaque. No denying Costa can create a world, but it would be fascinating to watch him do something outside this terribly sad nighttown.
“Horse Money” 3 stars
Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa makes another beautifully composed tour through the slums around Lisbon. This one doesn’t have the same power as his “Colossal Youth,” and there is no storyline, but the mood is certainly sustained. In Portuguese, with English subtitles.
Rating: Not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter
Showing: Grand Illusion
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