(2/2) “If It’s Love, It Must Work Out:” Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela and Modes of Hauntology

A post by Edward Guetti

**This is the latter part of the article, with the preceding component coming before.

Finding a Home, Putting Words to Rest

The character of Vitalina in Cavalo Dinheiro reminds Ventura not only of his neglected obligations to his wife, but she also reminds Ventura of his role, in Cavalo Dinheiro, of bringing about the despair that killed Joaquim. Only after reciting letters from official bodies, detailing information related to the burial of her husband, her birth, her marriage, all of which cannot approach a truthful account of her situation, does she put to Ventura the claim that he had brought ruin to her and Joaquim by cutting Joaquim’s arm during a fight so as to render it paralyzed. It is impossible to tell if this same accusation carries over into VV, as the circumstances surrounding Joaquim’s death in VV do not mention any sort of paralysis, and Ventura is a different avatar of the Ventura character. What further complicates or blurs the distinction between the movies is Ventura’s (i.e., the actor’s) presence as the priest of an empty church. This priest, too, is fleeing a personal shame from Cape Verde (related to his refusal to baptize or bless a group of people who are shortly killed in a gruesome car crash). The priest passes his time alternating between repeating certain phrases to himself or beseeching God to cast His eyes to the “shadows.” In many ways, it is not obvious that Ventura-as-a-Priest is meant to be a different character than, say, the Ventura of Juventude em Marcha.

(1/2) “If It’s Love, It Must Work Out:” Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela and Modes of Hauntology

A post by Edward Guetti

Pedro Costa’s most recent movie, Vitalina Varela (2019), begins with a slow procession of a funeral cortège that emerges from the almost total darkness of an alleyway bordering a cemetery wall. The priest, whether from exhaustion or the tremors that constantly shake his hands, is shown collapsed on the sidewalk. The audience, like Vitalina, has arrived too late to see the funeral service, and the priest’s exhaustion provokes the question how many dead have been buried in this dark night. In a recent interview with Film Comment, Costa himself describes the lives of those who are the subjects of his Cape Verdean movies as condemned long before they were born. But Costa’s Cape Verdean films are not simplified allegories of colonial violence or of damaged life in relation to this superhuman inheritance. There is nothing so abstract or diagnostic in these movies, and Vitalina Varela (‘VV’), in particular, represents a crowning achievement of this series not only because it takes up the perspective of a woman as exemplary as Mrs. Varela, but, uniquely in this series, VV celebrates the autonomy of its protagonist. But to see this autonomy rightly, we will need to contrast this against the primarily male dynamic of the earlier films in this series that begins with Casa de Lava (1994), and re-commences in the third film of his Cartas de Fontainhas trilogy, Juventude em Marcha [Colossal Youth] (2006), the short film Tarrafal (2007), and the precursor to VV, Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money] (2014) in which Mrs. Varela made her debut as herself.