Therefore, it took thirty months between the awarding of the top prize to the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Festival in 2019 and the possibility of finally seeing this masterpiece in France on the screens. Vitalina Varela It’s a pretty cool movie that we’ve seen very few like in a decade.
A film in which ruthless Portuguese colonial geography plots the life-crushing story of a woman named Vitalina. This Cape Verdean woman explains her story in the film. In this former Portuguese colony, off the coast of Africa, peasant Vitalina left her first love, Joaquim Brito, to work as a builder in Lisbon. He will live in the semi-slum Cova da Mora in the Amadora district of the Portuguese capital. Within twenty-five years, he gave few signs of life to his wife Vitalina, except for two round trips and two letters. One of the letters contained a plane ticket that I got too late.
During the first return, they began to build a house in their native village. But when Joachim returns the second time, he has to leave without giving a quiet explanation to Vitalina who she will never see again, when she is pregnant with a boy named Bruno.
When she joined Lisbon at age 55 with her famous plane ticket, she arrived too late, and Joachim had just died, accused of stabbing a friend at work. Alone in a country of which she knows nothing, Vitalina chooses to stay in the house occupied by Joaquim in the middle of a neighborhood illegally built by thousands of Cape Verdean diaspora residents.
Pedro Costa scours a Lisbon suburban space, searching for traces of the deceased’s years of life, secrets, and shadows that speak as things conjure up feminine conquests. The lead actress, Vitalina, a peasant by profession, becomes a tragic heroine during the two-hour film about this failed mourning. She does not hide the women’s dissatisfaction with these despicable husbands who still love them to death.
The starting point of the house, the structured interior space of this stolen presence, is here a stunning abstract painting, in black (by Soulages) and white. Fragments mingle with it, weaving a radiant web to this end that takes us to courage. Director Pedro Costa knows that while filming Vitalina telling her own story, “She was going through a very difficult time. I understood, he said, that it was a way to say goodbye to her husband and to be with him. The film is his passage from darkness to light.”[1]. In fact, you should have seen her cry in Locarno when the jury also awarded her for Best Female Translation.
Article published at the time of the Locarno Festival (2019)
[1] Pedro Costa, “Cinema is very scary”, ReleaseJanuary 12, 2022. Interview with Sandra Onana.
