En avant, jeunesse!

This film is an immersion in poverty: although each photographic set-up is richly subtle and brilliantly composed, the subject matter of the film deals with the poverty brought on by the destruction of the past, by the loss of jobs and family and community.

It should be stated at the onset that probably, were this film were shown in the average theatrical multiplex, 98% of the audience would walk out in the first fifteen or twenty minutes, as the pace is glacial, there is no plot to speak of, dialogue is fitful and seems to be aimless (although if one listens carefully, the effect is cumulatively meaningful) and there is almost no camera movement whatever--single set-ups are made and the viewer often sees the same scene for fifteen or twenty minutes.

As many reviews have noticed, there are definitive echoes of Samuel Beckett in the "I cant go on--I'll go on" mood that characterizes much of the absurdity of modern existence, and visually there are echoes of Vermeer--well, enough. If you want action, laughs, logic and easy entertainment this film ain't it; most people would hate sitting through any of this--if, however, you want an intellectual challenge from a thoughtful filmmaker, this might be in your queue--but don't expect the usual feel-good art film.

This filmmaker is Portuguese and has been chronicling the Cape Verdean immigrant population of Lisbon for some time. The Portuguese title means "Youth on the March;" it's not clear where the "Colossal" comes from in the English title, "Colossal Youth." In either case the phrases are presumably ironic. Nobody is going anywhere. Using cinema vérité methods, Costa focuses on Ventura, a tall, lean sixty-something Cape Verdean man living in Lisbon whose wife leaves his cave-like second-story slum dwelling, tossing out the window and thereby destroying a lot of the furniture before doing so. Ventura subsequently appears to wander around acting as "a genial but vacant guide" to a series of people he refers to as "children" or "son" or daughter" and who engage in "impossibly long-winded monologues" in "uniformly grimy, unlit interiors" (except for a couple of bright white ones in the new housing project that has since replaced the slum; these quotations are from Justin Chang's review in Variety written after the film's Cannes Festival screening). Occasionally Ventura, who refers to himself as a "retired laborer," recalls building projects he worked on when he first came to Lisbon and a fall he suffered during one of them, but he does not offer much commentary or advice to his younger interlocutors.

The visuals are mostly gray, with patches of color that sing out in contrast. Ventura plays cards; look as at a new apartment in the project; listens there to Vanda (Vanda Duarte, subject of an earlier Costa film) talking about her painful childbirth experience,and later with her child; plays cards or eat with "sons;" and visits the national museum where another "son" is a guard.

Costa offers less to viewers (and conversely perhaps gives them more to do) than almost any filmmaker presenting lives and people. Hence, in part paradoxically, he has a "coterie of fans" whom this new film will keep in "rapt attention"-- while doubtless "proving a colossal bore to anyone else" (Justin Chang again). Costa is a minimalist, and in minimal art, less is more; with success, the principle of the "tremendous trifle" will apply. Elements that elsewhere would go unnoticed will become significant or beautiful. The online cinephile writer Aquerello (Strictly Film School) believes this to be true of Colossal Youth and says of Ventura that his "lean and angular physicality cuts a dark and sinuous figure as majestic and transfixing as the works of art that frame him" in the museum. Aquerello further comments on the film's most studied element, in which an injured laborer asks Ventura to write a letter home to his girlfriend --a letter, Aquerello speculates, that also subsequently "becomes an expression of the wan protagonist's own sense of abandonment since his wife has left him." Aquerello calls the repetition of the letter's phrases in the film an "incantation." This, he thinks, typifies "the transfiguration of the corporeal into the ethereal through mundane ritual" of the film's "awkward composition, disarming humility, and poetic ineloquence."

In its most elaborated form the letter Aquerello refers to goes like this:

"My love, being together again will brighten our lives for at least 30 years. I'll come back to you strong and loving. I wish I could offer you 100,000 cigarettes, a dozen fancy dresses, a car, the little lava house you always dreamed of, a threepenny bouquet. But most of all, drink a bottle of good wine and think of me. Here, it's nothing but work. There are over a hundred of us now. Did my letter arrive safely? Still nothing from you. Some other time. Every day, every minute, I learn beautiful new words for me and you alone made to fit us both, like fine silk pajamas, wouldn't you like that? I can only send you one letter a month. I often get scared building these walls. Me with a pick and cement, you with your silence, a pit so deep, it swallows you up. It hurts to see these horrors that I don't want to see. Your lovely hair slips through my fingers like dry grass. Often, I feel week and think I'm going to forget you."

The overwhelming impression of Ventura is of fatigue, and one of my points of reference from literature for Costa's film-making as exhibited in "Colossal Youth" is the novels and to a lesser extent the plays of Samuel Beckett. "I can't go on. I'll go on," is a famous Beckett conclusion. Beckett's Irish gift for the music of language served him so well that he deliberately switched to French to limit himself, though in his own English translations of the results, especially the plays, the poetry still sings in the mud and ruins of his devastated dead-end characters' lives.

Beckett works entirely with the ear- and mind-stimulating power of words. However impoverished the vocabulary, in the hands of a master words can work magic. That may happen intermittently with the images and sound in Costa's film. What lasts, though, is a sense of the hopelessness of urban immigrant poverty.

Sometimes I watch drama to feel "thrust out from the depths." This is not a drama. This is in a way real and I didnt want to relate.

It is like this poor soul that I pass on the street and I didn't want to see again.

I can not actually like any of this characters. It is close to the ugly true. It is unpleasant to watch. The poverty smells very bad. I cant really accept even the metaphorical beginning as such.

It is skillfully shot. Light, composition - it is like a painting. A painting by Vincent van Gogh. It have the same dull colors as "The Potato Eaters". But except any presence of God.

My rating didn't matter. "I dint like it" doesn't mean nothing. The consummation term "rating" cant apply to this movie.

Don't look for a plot. Immerse yourself in the sequence of apparently disconnected vignettes. Get to know the main character, Ventura, a Cape Verdean that emigrated to Portugal around 1972; now, retired and still poor.

This is scrambled story telling in slow motion. Often I found myself thinking about Beckett. The dialogs appear irrelevant, having to do with mundane personal life experiences, friends and relatives. These are poorly educated people after all. In fact one better pay close attention to the prate. It is through small revelations and asides in conversations that we pick up the clues to the life of Ventura and those close to him.

The quiet and unpretentious acting, the extended takes, the absence of broad movements, the occasional lengthy silence, all can be soporific. Yet one needs to listen carefully.

The most captivating aspect is what the director and the cameraman did. Each scene is meticulously framed. Except for a couple of simple pans, the camera is invariably fixed. The overall result is like walking through an art museum. Each shot is a painting, the actors sometimes still, sometimes moving in and out of the frame. The naturalistic lighting reminded of paintings by Rembrandt of persons of a certain standing in Dutch society. Here Pedro Costa paints the faces of simple folks in the stark and denuded ambiances of a poor neighborhood. The visual effect is magical.

The actors are not dramatically stressed, except for the principal female role. Her long, inward monologues feel so authentic and natural that I could swear she was acting her own true self. The male actors are stiff placeholders, but don't dismiss what they are saying.

The story plays as a song. There is a refrain in the form of a love letter to a woman left behind in Cape Verde. It is repeated many times throughout. Again pay attention to the words each time as small variations occur with a telling commentary.

The ironic title is delectable.

We can find lots of examples like this. Today, yesterday, all along the history of movie making. Did you know that, in its time, "Citizen Kane" was not exactly recognized? We need movies that really dare to go against the "easy thinking" of blockbusters, Borat and others... movies that some people avoid because they feel... bored. Bored??? Why do people think that their boredom is important for the destiny of the world?... Maybe for the destiny of "their" world. But who cares? This is just one of the greatest movies of 2006, a challenge to look at people and places without the boring mediocrity of reality TV. Yes, boring.