he Fontainhas quarter of Lisbon, the setting of Pedro Costa's Bones (1997) and In Vanda's Room (2000), was home to much of the city's Cape Verdean community, before their shanty town was demolished and its residents relocated. Among the displaced was Ventura, the protagonist of Costa’s latest semi-fiction, Colossal Youth. While the residents of Fontainhas are being relocated to the more spacious and soulless Casal Boba projects, Ventura’s wife returns to Cape Verde. Ventura then spends the movie looking for his “children,” which turns out to mean an endless procession of old neighbors to whom he’s a father figure; whether he has any biological kids isn’t clear.

While the English title is a nod to cult post-punks Young Marble Giants, the Portuguese title translates as “youth on the march,” evoking the leftists in the military who overthrew the dictatorship of Marcel Caetano in the 1974 Carnation Revolution (flowers in the barrels of guns and all that). If this was unquestionably good for Portugal, you won’t hear Ventura saying so. Most immigration from Cape Verde and other colonies occurred in the years following Portugal’s democratization, but Ventura was there before. Perhaps he feels the promise of the revolution has been betrayed, or perhaps it wasn’t all that relevant to him in the first place. Though Portugal prides itself on the smooth assimilation of immigrants, Ventura is still an outsider.

Costa is among the most austere of directors, shooting long verité takes in which mostly non-pro actors play cards or complain about their families. Several characters from his earlier movies return, including former protagonist Vanda, who gets an infuriating rambling monologue early in the movie, which Ventura, like the audience, tunes out after a while. Whether you consider this deliberately boring scene a gauntlet thrown down to a complacent bourgeoisie or a director being a dick depends on your relative sympathy for the bourgeoisie and for directors.


If you love/hate both, turn up late if you wish, but be aware that the brilliant Vanda can turn insufferable into hilariously insufferable in a heartbeat, as occurs when they watch a snake eat a crocodile on TV. In most of the rest of the movie, it feels like the TV is watching Ventura: the shots are almost always fixed and from a slightly low angle. Colossal Youth relies on natural light sources, making its interiors appear far drabber than those in Vanda’s telenovelas; when mirrors are used, the characters glow as though they’re lit by cathode rays.

Ventura remains as blank as any of Bresson’s models; that we associate his face with dignity is a textbook example of typage. He mostly acts as object; on the few occasions he mentions his troubles to his children, they pay even less attention to him than he does to them. The counterexamples are the puzzling scenes in which Ventura and his friend Lento are hiding out in a shed, which appear to take place outside the main chronology of the movie. Ventura dictates a letter home for Lento, wishing for “a hundred thousand cigarettes” to give to his beloved. Lento doesn’t have the means to write the letter, so Ventura repeats his ever-lengthening composition throughout the movie, while Lento can’t memorize it. In its absurdity, the situation expresses their past and Ventura’s future longing for absent loves, eventually becoming an epitaph.

While surface dullness is essential to Costa’s construction, the best moments are when the movie isn’t boring. Opening monologue aside, most of Vanda’s scenes fall into this category. Having traded heroin for methadone, her ravaged lungs give life to banal dialogue made hilarious by her delivery. The most memorable moment of all occurs when a hospital patient called Paulo the Crutch makes explicit the themes alluded to over the preceding two point something hours, churning his grief at his unemployment and the loss of his family. Yet in the end even he has someone to comfort him; Ventura doesn’t. For almost any problem, there’s hope that one day things will improve. Age is the great exception.

Colossal Youth is currently touring the festival circuit.