Whether viewed in its original Portuguese version (Juventude Em Marcha), in English (Colossal Youth) or in French (En avant jeunesse), the feeling is the same. Pedro Costa’s new film is a monument built on a new basis and the English title -referring to the pop summit first album of British Young Marble Giants- points out well what this young colossus aims: the determination of a manifesto as well as the precise manufacturing of a pop song.
Since Casa de Lava in 1994, Pedro Costa shoots his films in Lisboa shanty town Fontainhas with its inhabitants -mostly Cape Verdeans immigrants. Since In Vanda’s Room, he only shoots with the lightest equipment: a DV camcorder and a few reflectors, to sculpt natural light, to avoid big machines between him and his non-professional actors. The first character was a young female drug-addict, Vanda ; then his masters, Daniel Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub editing in Le Fresnoy –Contemporary art studios in Tourcoing- in the documentary Où gît votre sourir enfoui?. Same device for fiction or documentary –an obsolete difference totally abolished in Costa’s work.
What matters is the encounter with a man or a woman and the right angle to take. What makes Colossal Youth monumental –350-hour rushes and 2 hour and an half cut– is mostly the mythological stature of its character, Ventura, who came from Cape-Verde in 1972 and is settled in Fontainhas ever since -a king in exile from the very beginning of the film: his wife Clotilde sends him out and throws his stuff through the window. After this divorce, Colossal Youth becomes the fiction of the community: the relatives Ventura goes to see are all his sons, like Vanda who comes back here and who is his daughter.
During a scene, Ventura visits the luxury rooms of the Gulbekian Foundation and when his eyes stare on a corner of the room no one can tell if he is looking at the Rubens on the wall or at the wall itself he built when he was a workman. We have the same impression facing a Costa film: aiming as well the beautiful and the necessary, trying to create the right image to fit the greatness of this proletariat.
Bastien Hader