Pedro Costa’s new film, Horse Money, represents a return to familiar ground for the portuguese filmmaker. Between arthouse and documentary filmmaking, Pedro Costa is celebrated everywhere around the world but in his own country . His peculiar and unconventional style of filmmaking is focused on phantasmagoric characters embedded in beautiful framed compositions of light, perspective …
The Festival du Nouveau Cinema has barely started and I already feel behind. Press screenings have been going on for over a week, and I missed many due to work. It doesn’t help that the first I show up to, a screening of Jauja, was cancelled due to a problem with the digital file. I …
Horse Money is an elusive entity, a picture of eerie dreamscapes and squalid urban degradation devoid of earthly logic. Our unknowing guide is a retired brick layer named Ventura, acting as a cipher for the displaced souls of the Cape Verdean immigrants, consorting us through a saprogenic world. Director Pedro Costa crafts a hallucinatory, soul-searching labyrinth out of the squalor and grime of the Lisbon slums, known to locals as Fontainhas. It’s almost soporific in its unending calmness, but it (mostly) avoids pretensions. Ventura drifts in a solipsistic daze through various scenes of displaced landscape and artifice. He does various non-activities with unvarying detachment: he meets his estranged ex-wife, and tries to make a call on a broken phone, and uses a urinal in a derelict bathroom, and visits a doctor. Each event is visually striking, yet completely uneventful (though a door does slam at one point). The lighting is hard and Costa works often in steep contrasts; Ventura moves in and out of shadows, disappearing and reappearing like the motif from a dream.
Two bodies, first in sexual motion, then in a dark stillness accompanied by conversations of previous grief and existential dread. It’s a subject explored before by Éric Rohmer and in a much lighter sense with Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. It’s a certain style of romantic trope in cinema history to focus heavily on interesting protagonists as they attempt to connect with each other, revealed who they are with brevity, jokes, and noxious nostalgia. Nuit #1, the first feature of Québécois Anne Émond, aspires to this lineage, taking us from a glitzy, sweaty club nightlife to a dingy, starving-artist-approved apartment for real-time, blunt sex until the title card announces the time for the sometimes illuminating, yet always sophomoric dialogue.