Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa offers a long and richly detailed look at his nation's poor and needy in this affecting blend of drama and documentary. Fontainhas was a community in Lisbon primarily populated by exiles from Cape Verde; Costa shot two of his earlier films there, Bones and In Vanda's Room, but Portuguese authorities tore down the village to make room for a new construction project, and its people were relocated to Casal Boba, a housing project on the edge of Lisbon. Ventura was a
native of Fontainhas who appeared in Bones; he and his wife, Clotilde (Isabel Cardoso), moved to Casal Boba, but Clotilde became disenchanted with her new surroundings and left him to move back to Cape Verde. Now Ventura, left to his own devices, struggles to make a decent and dignified home for himself and the friends he calls his "children" in the slums of Casal Boba, including Vanda (Vanda Duarte), a recovering drug addict who was the focus of In Vanda's Room, and Lento (Alberto Barros), a close friend who is the only one Ventura trusts to hear the lovesick poetry he's written for his absent wife. Colossal Youth received its North American premiere at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Beautifully photographed, the elliptical, often mysterious and wholly beguiling film Colossal Youth looks and sounds as if it were made on another planet.
Eventually, across the monumental boredom, mesmerizing, nearly still images and poetic rhythms of this 155-minute film, something like pathos or meaning can be sensed, if not really apprehended.
Rather than impose actors on the scene, Costa involves the people who already live there. Instead of training them to perform a story, he locates a skeletal narrative from a rehearsal process based on their personal stories.
Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha), has some arresting images and an interesting central character but its lack of narrative pace will exhaust the patience of most audiences.
Far-reaching study of poverty, loneliness and hope amid suffering is weighed down by its soporific structure, deliberately indolent pacing and endlessly attenuated conversations among a clutch of ill-defined personalities.
Colossal Youth can best be described as a revelation... Costa abandons even the pretense of pseudo-documentary, instead transforming the quotidian into mythology.
A unique metaphysical vision that, tracing its characters' dislocation, seems to weave between alternate worlds as easily as it navigates from image to image.
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