Colossal Youth is the English title of Pedro Costa's film 2006 Juventude Em Marcha, which I watched today for tomorrow's Criterion Club discussion. It's almost three hours long, and I found myself dozing midway through it because it is resolutely monotonous: very long shots whose painterly composition is mostly dark on dark with small patches of light; characters whose relations to each other are obscure; repetition of settings, dialogue, tableaux; a slow, deliberate pace with characters wandering in and out of shots; no plot. There's an anchor character, Ventura, an immigrant from Cabo Verde, who circulates among others he calls his children although it doesn't seem that they actually are his children. The opening sequence is a window with furniture being thrown through it, and then a woman named Clotilde holds a knife and tells us (she's looking straight at the camera) how she used to swim as a form of escape. Ventura then goes to see Bete who rejects him the first time we see her; he tells her that his wife Clotilde has destroyed all his furniture and left him. This would seem to set up a story, but we don't revisit it for the rest of the film. Instead, we follow Ventura as he goes on a series of visits: to Vanda who narrates her childbirth story and her drug addiction while they loll on her bed watching a TV show we can't see; to his lunches with a man who, late in the film, is identified as Vanda's husband, and who listens to him in silence; to Lento, who plays cards and sleeps with him in a hovel, as well as asking for a letter that Ventura recites but never writes for him. Is Lento his younger self? In between these visits, which repeat themselves, we see Ventura meeting an agent who is showing him the new housing he can have, as the slum he lives in is going to be demolished, rooms as blindingly white as the rest of the film's decors are dark. Ventura insists he needs a bigger space with more rooms, for his children. ("How many children do you have?" "I don't know.") The effect of these circular movements is to focus on the acts of conversation rather than on any action. It is possible that some of these events are flashbacks but the film doesn't seem interested in making temporal relationships apparent. The effect is to confront the viewer with daily life and relationships in a strange kind of purgatory.
There are a few moments that connect the to a world outside this round of visits and these black-and-white spaces. With Lento, Ventura pulls out a record player and plays a song that seems to be about the July 5, 1975 independence of Cabo Verde and Amilcar Cabral (who led the struggle but was assassinated in 1973, in events that precipitated the coup in Portugal in 1974). And there's a scene of Ventura and Lento standing in a window talking about the political events (either independence struggles or the carnation revolt) and repression in the slums. And Ventura talks of working in the construction of the Gulbenkian Museum, various banks and buildings for the rich; there is a scene where he is in the museum but is escorted out.
The effect of using Ventura as the focal point is to make him stand in for the African immigrant experience in Portugal, in its impoverished version. What does Costa want us to take away from this experience? While I was watching the film I didn't really like it that much but it's sticking with me. Now I want to watch Vitalina Varela, (also on Criterion) which came out in 2019, and centers a woman's experience.
Here's an interview with Costa from the New York Film Festival:
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