I did not truly understand director Pedro Costa’s last film Horse Money but it did seem to have some interesting things to say. This one is puzzling in many ways as well but I felt that I more or less understood its themes. Unfortunately I also felt that it oversells itself by being so focused with its visuals that almost nothing else matters. This is a film that truly tries to aspire to being a painting in every frame, but shows its hand so much in doing so that we are reminded over and over again that none of this is real.

The film’s title is the name of a woman who travels to Portugal from her native Cape Verde. But this is a belated, long overdue voyage as her husband who she has been waiting for decades to reunite with is dead. All that is left for her is to pick her way through the shanty that he lived in to understand the life that he lived without her. It is an exploration full of recriminations and regrets as she bemoans the dilapidated condition of the house and compares it to what they had in Cape Verde and accuses him of becoming lazy and unfaithful in Portugal. She also meets the priest who ministers to the community and who was the one who buried her husband. He himself seems sick and decrepit with age, complaining that no one comes to pray any longer. She meets others who were presumably friends and colleagues of her husband and all were equally full of misery for their life in Portugal.

Sparse is it is in terms of narrative detail, it is almost necessary to know the director’s background and previous body of work to realize that it is once again about the miserable lives led by the people of Cape Verde who moved to Portugal. Many of his films, it seems, including this one, are set in the same impoverished neighborhood of Fontainhas outside of Lisbon. This one adds an interesting angle to the familiar lamentations of the poor by contrasting how appealing life was in Cape Verde. Vitalina acknowledges that they were poor there as well and claims a wholesomeness and satisfaction to life that is absent in Portugal. This is not altogether convincing as we never see any scenes in Cape Verde and this is a film that is completely immersed in the gloomiest depths of misery. One also wonders why so many of these moved to Portugal in search of a better if that were true. Nevertheless I interpret this not as a documentary but a highly subjective personal account of such an immigrant’s lived experience. There is artistic merit in such an approach but even here I don’t think it succeeds.

The difficulty is that the film is obsessed about composing each shot for maximum artistry to a ridiculous extent. The camera positively lingers on the pores of Vitalina’s face. When she monologues, it looks like she is being instructed to move her mouth as little as possible so as not to ruin the composition of the shot. The knobs and dimples on the rough walls of her shack are magnified into a veritable landscape. Powerful spotlights are brought into nearly scene to create a world of sharp edges and harsh contrasts. In many shots, you can clearly tell that the director is actively trying to achieve the effect of it looking like a painting. While the aesthetic appeal is undeniable, the result is distracting and extremely unrealistic. The shots look like studio photography with nothing natural about them at all. It’s impossible to believe that these are real places and real people as the constructed artifice of the film is always front and center. The art does not serve the theme or the narrative at all. It is the photography itself that takes primacy.

Pedro Costa is a highly regarded director in art film circles but I’m beginning to think that his work just isn’t the right fit for me. By disdaining from treating the characters as if they were real people, rather than abstractions, it seems unlikely to appeal on an emotional level and I dislike how empty this is of surrounding context and narrative detail.