oscarwp’s review published on Letterboxd:
In an essay about 'In Vanda’s Room', Thom Andersen writes that it has been critiqued for portraying poverty, issues of immigration, and drug abuse to the point of miserabilism. Defending Costa, Andersen writes that: “those who regard In Vanda’s Room as a misérabiliste … simply haven’t seen it … They have seen the actions but not the images”. One aspect of Andersen’s point is that the film doesn’t show images of the world’s misery, but its beauty. Adapting Andersen’s argument to 'Colossal Youth', one should focus on the sympathy that the residents of Fontainhas extend to one another and the wealth of their stories, not their misfortune that leads them to poverty and drug abuse. From this perspective, the answer to the question of whether Costa aestheticizes poverty or not would be: Yes, he does. But for Andersen, this is “its greatest virtue”, because it places “the rich and the poor … under the same sky”. This, however, doesn’t seem to be a completely sufficient conclusion to the film. The temporal movement between past and present, and the deterritorialization from Fontainhas to the reterritorialization to Casal da Boba does in fact also present a societal attempt to oppress the residents of Fontainhas. Perhaps one shouldn’t look at the film as either-or. Is there a difference between focusing on Ventura’s beauty or misery? By focusing on his misery, Ventura is reduced to carry the identity of “the poor immigrant”. If we only focus on his beauty the same kind of pity, although well meaning, can occur. Perhaps we should look at the two as indivisible from each other. In fact, “indivisibility” seems to be a key word in regard to Costa’s aesthetic.
Ventura is playing himself, rather than being himself, a cinema of Brechtian quotation. This is also what Rancière argues when he writes that Ventura transforms into a third character , “a character who is and is not foreign to our lives”. As a result, Ventura becomes “impersonal” and “evades recognition”. Costa doesn’t try to make us identify or sympathize with Ventura. Rancière’s notion of “a third character” echoes Deleuze’s idea of the “power of the false”:
“What cinema must grasp is not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character when he himself starts to ‘make fiction’, when he enters into ‘the flagrant offence of making up legends’ and so contributes to the invention of his people … the character has ceased to be real or fictional … the character is continually becoming another.”
'Colossal Youth' doesn’t attempt to grasp or represent Ventura’s identity, but transforms and presents him as “a sublime errant”. The act of becoming another is not only reserved to the characters but is also valid for the filmmaker himself. Deleuze writes: “He too becomes another, in so far as he takes real characters as intercessors and replaces his fictions by their own story-telling, but conversely, gives these story-tellings the shape of legends.” For Deleuze, story-telling is that which “produces collective utterances” The letter in 'Colossal Youth' does exactly this. In relation to the writings of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari write that “the message doesn’t refer back to an enunciating subject who would be its cause … There isn’t a subject; there are only collective assemblages of enunciation ”. A point that is also applicable to modern political cinema, and here in Ventura’s enunciation of the letter. It refers to a singular “I” and “you” but transforms itself from the individual to the collective. Rancière suggests something along those lines as well. The fact that Ventura repeats the letter so many times transforms it to a “performance of an art of sharing, an art inseparable from the life and experience of the displaced”. This reciprocity of relations, or collective assemblages of enunciation, makes it a political art. But it is not a political art that tries to “expose structures of domination and mobilize energies to change them”, as Rancière notes. Costa doesn’t try to create a united voice that seeks to change status quo. Rather, his project echoes Deleuze’s view on modern political cinema: “It is as if modern political cinema were no longer constituted on the basis of a possibility of evolution and revolution (…) but on impossibilities”. In the scene that takes place during the Carnation Revolution, the official discourse of the revolution being peaceful is contrasted by Ventura and Lento’s dialogue: “We have to manage on our own … They took Jaya … They beat him up … He was the first, but not the last”, says Lento holding a butcher knife in his hand. Ventura recites the letter once again, but this time Lento interrupts him: “What’s the use now? The letter will never reach Cape Verde”. The letter becomes a way of emphasizing the art of the displaced, but is at the same time the medium that underscores their hopelessness. They are excluded from the Portuguese society and without contact to their Cape Verdean roots. "Other" in every way.
In another scene, Lento and Ventura are in their shack listening to a song on a broken vinyl player. The lyrics of the song go: “Raise your arms and shout freedom! Shout, O independent people, Shout, O liberated people, July 5th means freedom, July 5th, the road to freedom”. While the song is playing, Lento is scratching the table with a pen, while Ventura is sitting with his head between his legs. The discrepancy between image and sound, stillness and revolution, the displaced two and the unified “we”, underscores that freedom does not belong to all. The Portuguese title 'Juventude em Marcha' translates to “Youth on the march” and emphasizes the film’s overall double movement between past and present. All signs of a forward-marching youth are only presented in the past. Costa shows that the possibilities of the future belong to the past, which could mark the disappearance of the collectiveness of Fontainhas.
Coming back to Costa’s ability of becoming another, it is the collective utterances that makes the film a collaboration between Costa and Ventura, bridging the gap between filmmaker and subject. As Andersen argues, it is “an act of collaboration in which there was true fraternity and equality because there was no abdication of responsibility on either side”. It becomes a cinema, at least in theory, echoing Rimbaud’s “I is another”, where Costa and Ventura “become others together and the one through the other”. In terms of space and temporality, Colossal Youth creates a hybrid aesthetic in which Ventura constantly moves between past and present, actual and virtual, real and imaginary, tragedy and chronicle, beauty and misery until they are completely entangled and made indiscernible. It is the result of a collaboration between filmmaker and character producing complex, multi-layered “collective utterances”. Perhaps the film itself fulfils Rancière’s notion of making an art adequate to the experiences of travelers.