Reseñas de la crítica

The result is something spectral, beguiling, deceptively quiet and still, and, by even this director’s standards, a singular feat of image-making and design.

There is a reason there are not many films like this. Vitalina Varela is so uncompromising and so concentrated that it threatens to absorb the projector beam, as if the projectionist’s black cue mark could take over the whole frame from one corner.

Repeating themes of desolation, loneliness, regret, and immiseration from previous films, Costa expresses his sympathy in dirge-like fashion. This highly stylized film, as visually striking as the others, is representation by the Rembrandt of the ghetto.

Costa’s work, since 2006’s Colossal Youth, resembles a radically stripped-down form of modernist opera that evokes high passions and tragic events while dispensing with music and singing.

This film demands a great deal of attention, but to me it works better than Costa’s widely admired Horse Money.

Vitalina Varela, for all the psychic and economic devastation it depicts, is beautiful to the point of being ravishing. Shot after shot reminds us that Costa’s cinephilic allegiances have always lain not just with austere, high-art divinities like Robert Bresson and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, but also with Jacques Tourneur, a B-movie master who knew how to dazzle the eye on a miniscule budget.

Most—if not all—of the shots in the film are static, composed to an extraordinary degree of rigor. This will either capture your attention for the next two hours or frustrate you. Should you surrender yourself to the film’s beautiful cinematography and whispered musings, you’ll find a breathtakingly gorgeous movie about love, death and immigration.

It’s a work of daring paradox. Despite its avant-garde stylings, it’s a film of virtual archeology, one that recovers the colossal symbolic power of classical American cinema—while nonetheless bearing the burden of new, unchallenged conventions, those of cinematic modernism.

While Costa’s earlier work traded in a demanding, stylized, austere (some would call it punishingly so) realism, in recent years his view has taken on a stunning pictorialism. In the opening shots of this film, one thinks of Goya and Velasquez; the clouds in the night sky evoke El Greco.

In this stillness, the wavering play of light becomes a dynamic element, steering attention to the moisture gathered in Vitalina’s eyes, or to the way a moving figure off-screen changes the fall of light in the room.

The surface quietudes, somnambulant movements, and rigors of a film like Vitalina Varela serve to turn every subtlety, every crinkling plastic bag and squeaky door, into a reverberating event.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of a woman in film, who has such a magical, such an overpowering aura around her as does Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela.