In an interview with Film Comment magazine, the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa mentions that his new film, “Horse Money,” which is currently running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was supposed to include the singer and writer Gil Scott-Heron, who died in 2011. The connection makes sense — Scott-Heron not only looks like Ventura, Costa’s main actor and something of his muse through the last decade of his work, but because the poet, especially in his final work, “I’m New Here,” is concerned with ghostly introspection, of political history and of the self.The two have always been intertwined in the work of Costa as well. Since “Casa de Lava” (1995), his films have continuously traveled inward, each more cerebral and transfixing than the next, while simultaneously confronting his country’s knotty political past. While filming “Casa de Lava” in Cape Verde, Costa was told by many of the residents that there was a community of former Cape Verdeans living in Fontainhas, a maze-like neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. Costa would dedicate his next three films to the residents of that community — the stunning loose trilogy of “Ossos” (1997), “In Vanda’s Room” (2000), and “Colossal Youth” (2006) — while at the same time perfecting a rigid formal style that would rely on long static takes, precise and painterly compositions, and a torpid rhythm that would stretch his films out to almost three hours.This doesn’t always make for easy viewing. Costa’s work takes not just patience but endurance, as there is little in the way of a plot. Like Scott-Heron’s work, it often feels immediately present, in the here and now, even if it’s constructed of pieces that float in an indeterminate place and time. It offers a unique experience that requires the viewer to forget the logic of traditional film style and structure, and to allow for confusion caused by the zigzagging flow of time.“Horse Money,” which premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival last year and subsequently screened at the New York Film Festival, is paradoxical in that it’s more accessible, mostly because of its truncated length, but also more fragmented and experimental than Costa’s previous work. The long takes and meticulous compositions are still in place, but it’s missing the type of anchoring that Fontainhas provided. In “Colossal Youth” the camera is locked in on Ventura, who wanders the streets and empty rooms of his neighbors as the buildings around him are torn down (the soundtrack is scattered with the noise of falling rock and machine-powered demolition). We know where Ventura is even as he is being forced to relocate.No such claims can be made for “Horse Money” which, if anything, can be said to take place within the nightmares of Ventura. What appears to be a hospital also appears to be empty, devoid of patients except for Ventura and a few others who roam the hallways, staggering in and out of the shadows. Is this a dream? Or maybe it’s one long death scene, Ventura’s mind reckoning with his past as he shuffles off this mortal coil?The introduction of the film might give some clue into what Costa is attempting with his work. “Horse Money” opens silently with a selection of photographs by Jacob Riis, whose flashbulb-blasts of tenement life in New York City depicted not just the squalor of his subject’s living conditions but also their interior life. Costa sees his work emerging out of the same tradition, an attempt to convey the dehumanizing nature of his country’s colonial past through moving images. There is no way to get around some of the gritty and harsh realities that surround them, and the truth is not found in a pitying portrait, but in telling their stories with all the complexity they warrant and deserve.This is most evident in the film’s central sequence and the boldest in any of Costa’s work. Toward the end of “Horse Money,” Ventura enters an elevator and finds a soldier inside. Painted green, the solider looks like a figurine, his gun drawn to his chest and starring straight ahead in a frozen pose. It’s an alarming image, partly because the rest of the film has been draped in shadows and now the characters are under bright light. Soon the solider begins to weep, and the two enter a brief dialogue, questioning the choices Ventura has made in his life and if he will be forgotten by history. It unfolds like a scene of psychological horror, a nightmare with Ventura conjuring up an image from his past as he confronts his future. But what gives the scene an extra charge, and which runs through the entirety of “Horse Money,” is that it allows Ventura’s story to be told with a degree of difficulty; there is no patronizing attitude from above.
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