Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (2019) begins after the disappearance of Joaquim, a Cape Verdean immigrant in Lisbon, and before the appearance of his widow, Vitalina Varela, who arrives in Portugal after the funeral rites, without having had the opportunity to say goodbye to her husband while he was alive. The dynamics between appearance and disappearance, as well as between presence and absence, are at the core of Costa’s film, being also crucial within the life story of the protagonist, Vitalina Varela.
The title Vitalina Varela, in itself, promotes a significant (con)fusion between film and character, while also redirecting us to a certain tradition of stories built according to the lives of their heroines, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (“Reader, I married him”) to Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, to Rainer Werner Fassbinder [The Mariage of] Maria Braun, among many, many others. Besides that, Costa films Vitalina in the fashion of the great stars of classical cinema, like Greta Garbo or Joan Crawford. More specifically, Costa seems to film his actress much in the same way Josef von Sternberg filmed Marlene Dietrich in the 30s.
Just like in the Sternberg/Dietrich cycle of films (seven overall, between The Blue Angel [Der blaue Engel], in 1930, and The Devil is a Woman, in 1935), Vitalina only appears on-screen several minutes after the beginning of the film. And, just like in Morocco or Shanghai Express, Vitalina Varela begins with its female protagonist arriving at a new geographical space, the one where the action takes place. At first, we see the airplane, and then the airport workers installing the airstair, a sort of red carpet for the glorious entrance of Vitalina. Finally, in close-up, we see the heroine’s feet on the stairs, just before we see her body—which takes us back to the last shots of Morocco, where Dietrich takes off her shoes so she can chase the man she loves in the desert sands.
Vitalina’s entrance is, thus, worthy of a Hollywood star. In a text published in the French magazine Trafic’s 115th issue (“Deux yeux dans la nuit. Vitalina Varela de Pedro Costa”), Jacques Rancière points out that that this Portuguese film is indeed influenced by models and structures from classical cinema. However, even if Costa films Varela as Sternberg filmed Dietrich (the fascination with the face, the insistence on the close-up, the body shown in expressive chiaroscuro…), we should draw an important distinction: if, in Morocco, the main character only takes off her shoes in the end, after having been comfortable and elegant in her shoes throughout the film, here we see Vitalina’s naked feet from the beginning. Pedro Costa looks back into melodrama, but strips it from ornaments, reduces it to the bone. And this has implications both at the narrative (the minimal action) and at the visual sphere (the restrained style, the hieratism, the constant interplay between light and shadow).
We learn about the story of Joaquim and Vitalina’s relationship from her. Alone in Joaquim’s darkened house, Vitalina speaks to the absent man, reconstructing the narrative of her/their past. Speaking simultaneously to the dead man and to us, spectators, Vitalina puts us, virtually, in the dead man’s place. Vitalina’s narrative is a story of disappearances, absences, and, above all, spatial non-coincidences: in forty years of marriage, she and Joaquim were physically together for only a limited number of days.
After their marriage—in the civil registry on 14th December 1982, and in church on 5th March 1983—, Joaquim spent only forty-five days in Cape Verde, during which the couple built the family house with their own hands. But, at some point, the husband left for Portugal, abandoning both the wife and their house. After his departure, Vitalina, alone and pregnant, finished the construction of the house.
In fact, the house in Cape Verde is the paradigmatic figure of the film due to its high symbolic value. In its ostensive materiality, it represents the relationship between Vitalina and Joaquim: a house (/a relationship) that the couple started building together but was suspended after his departure, which left it—the house and the relationship—solely in the hands of Vitalina. A house (/a relationship) where he never got to live and where she lived all her life, alone, for forty years, “waiting for the plane ticket to Portugal.” She continued living in the house, which is to say, within the remains of a lost love (“there’s nothing left of that love, of that clarity,” she tells us), whereas he, in the alleyways of Lisbon, Buraca, Coimbra, France, was “chasing those street women, like a lamb that just escaped the barn.” This way, Joaquim ended up dishonoring the memory of the same love that Vitalina, on her part, honored by remaining in the house of Cape Verde. She stayed alone in the marriage: in a shot that comes after the film’s title, we see a photograph of a young Vitalina, dressed in her wedding gown, but uncannily unaccompanied.
The spatial non-coincidence of the lovers, throughout the forty years they lived separated, is signaled by the symbolic opposition between the two houses. As a distorted answer to the house in Cape Verde, Joaquim builds a house in Lisbon, where he lives for the rest of his life and into which Vitalina moves after his death. This house is reminiscent of the housing districts of earlier films by Costa, such as Ossos, In Vanda’s Room or Colossal Youth. Dark, dirty, little, forever-provisory houses. “This house of yours is a poorly done job,” Vitalina says. “Windows like gutters. I keep hitting my head on these shitty doors. The house we built together in Cape Verde is incomparable.”
Thus, the house in Lisbon reflects the diminished life that Joaquim indulged in, a symbol of his failure. That is the reason why Vitalina hates it and bumps her head in its doors, as if she didn’t fit in this house that Joaquim never got to improve, even if he indeed had the intention of doing that, making it worthy of receiving his wife someday.
Vitalina—and their house in Cape Verde—represent the life that Joaquim could have chosen. Instead, he opted for going to Lisbon, build this house, a “poorly done job,” for living a life of poverty, of petty crime and easy women (there is also a second woman in the film, who is mentioned and whose photos we see in the beginning). But if this house is a “symbolic figure,” it also has a materiality of its own. These bricks, this cement, this roof that terrorize Vitalina in stormy nights are all that she can touch now that Joaquim is forever lost. The house is Joaquim reconverted into architectural matter—flawed in its construction just like he was on a moral level.
Of all this, the anger of Vitalina stands out. This woman is angry at having been abandoned. And she doesn’t seem willing to forgive. When she speaks to the deceased for the first time in the film, she says: “You’re surprised, aren’t you? You didn’t expect my visit. You don’t want me close to you even in your dying hours,” then adding: “I don’t trust you in life nor in death. Your body… in the graveyard, in the coffin… I couldn’t see it. Are you dead? Are you buried under the ground?” Later, she asks him if he threw away all the letters she sent him to Lisbon, many of them—we presume—never answered.
As it happens many times in family melodramas centered on female figures, the man is his wife’s hangman. However, in this case, Joaquim is a ‘hangman’ by omission and self-silencing, instead of being it due to deliberate action. Leaving Vitalina, he turned into the ghost who haunts her. And in that process, by putting her life in a state of suspension which is impossible to dissolve (his death does not create a sense of closure for Vitalina), he turned her also, and forever, into a ghost. The Vitalina that we see on-screen is, thus, a posthumous woman who is sentenced to recall the life she could have had for many years, but only had for those forty-five days which she spent with her husband back in their homeland.
Dead in life, Vitalina gets the same destiny as all the characters conceived by Pedro Costa, including Joaquim: she takes up residence in old Lisbon, a scenario for a sad phantasmagoria, where these men and women turn into shadows (“of those shadows we are all made of,” as the priest says, a character played by Costa’s habitué Ventura), into zombies (as in Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, conjured by Costa in Casa de Lava), into ghosts.
Lisbon—or, better said, Lisbon’s slums—is the purgatorial place that completes the failure of these character’s lives. Just like Ventura, Joaquim was victim of “the system.” As Rancière writes, “These men are not the guilty ones, the system is. And it is the system that must be judged.” This is the perspective of the informed spectator who holds the keys to unlock the ideological web behind the Pedro Costa’s stories, seeing them by what they mean. But Vitalina doesn’t see Joaquim as we do: as a symbolic figure. She cannot see him as a victim of the system, a metaphor, but as her husband: just a man. And as a man, he is responsible for his acts and, consequently, deserves being punished.
In his pertinent reading of the film, Rancière stresses that Vitalina “does not know the ‘system.’” Hence, she cannot know that she also is a victim of that same system. Knowing that would result in an metaphorization of herself. Vitalina would be acting as representative of all African women who suffered collateral damage of colonialism through the fate of their husbands. But she knows that, for herself, she is not representative of anything or anyone, just like Joaquim was not in representation of anything or anyone. She only knows that she was destroyed by a man who died with his hands stained by her blood.
Constructing his film very closely to the life experience of Vitalina Varela, Pedro Costa invites us to temporarily suspend ideology and to live vicariously a pianissimo and obscure melodrama.
