Horse Money (2014)

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cast: Ventura, Vitalina Varela, Tito Furtado, Benvindo Tavares, Antonio Santos as the Living statue, Alberto 'Lento' Barros, Pedro Tavares, Isabel Cardoso, António Semedo Moreno, Luiz Mendonça, Arlindo Pina, José António Veiga, João Gomes, Maurício Fernandes, Joel Santos

 

We'll keep on being sliced by machines.

 

By the end of Horse Money, I had presumed that the desolate world that Ventura (playing a representation of him) has wandered through was purgatory. Arguably that is the right way to tackle this film on one level, though on further viewing it is a danger that Pedro Costa avoids that he never leaves his cast victimised, instead figures who survive and get on in life in spite of illness, injury, death and isolation. Also, if this be purgatory or the Asphodel Meadows, this one is specifically for the poverty class, as immigrants from the Cape Verde like Ventura's character here wander unstuck through time.  

At moments he claims he is nineteen and three months old, in the middle of March 11th 1975, and at others is he a retired bricklayer and labourer suffering from permanent injuries from a knife attack and possible a form of dementia or symptoms causing his memories to blur together. Whatever the case, he was a man who came to Portugal, gained and lost a job in bricklayer, and is both haunted by memories of a fight he had with another immigrant where he was stabbed, and that he was barely involved with the Carnation Revolution¹, a seismic event when he was there, jabbed about it eventually by a literal personification of it that he did not do enough.

Pedro Costa by the 2010s had fully cemented his reputation in the United Kingdom, because by the time of Vitalina Varela (1990), his follow up, his work (almost entirely through distributor Second Run in the United Kingdom, and more access in the United States) was available finally. Let it be known, his is a unique and "difficult" example of meditative cinema at first, a trajectory that morphed from Blood (1989), a more conventionally created if subtle and still great film, to something entirely alien. It was the second film in his career Casa de Lava (1994), which was meant to be a remake of I Walked With a Zombie (1943), as Costa has openly talked about his love of old American cinema including b-movies, only to have a drastic change of heart mid-production. What happened with Costa was that, getting to Costa Rica to film his remake, he saw the environment, felt a superior film was to be made documenting the environment, and in communicating to the locals, it led to him their migrated families in Fontaínhas, a community back home in Portugal in Lisbon.

Fontaínhas has long disappeared from the form he found it, yet he has kept the place long after its vanishing alive in a form of cinematic spiritualism. Fontaínhas was a slum and whilst there is an inherent danger of a white filmmaker tackling a subject about poverty especially for its black migrant community, a form of poverty pornography, his interactions as been documented led to him actually being challenged for making fabricated stories and changing his work onwards, to singnificantly smaller crews filming the productions and a more intimate collaboration with his casts of non-actors. From Ossos (1997) onwards, the fact he has been in this world for the decades onwards shows this is no longer accusable as a glib vacation for him but a real empathetic art, transcribing a world in work here and elsewhere that is dictated from figures within the community onwards like Ventura, the star of this film, or Vitalina Varela, who plays the female character (her namesake) found for the film and would get her own film in the lead in Vitalina Varela.

Costa is a chronicler of these peoples' lives, this set up with incredibly old monochrome photographs, of people not in Fontaínhas or Portugal but born in turn-of-the-century New York City, images taken by Jacob Riis, a Danish-American social reformer, journalist and social documentary photographer whose work shown here presents the exact tone of the film the viewer will see. Of tenements and shacks with people of various ethnicities together, tiny cramped worlds of labourers with filthy stripped walls and ruffled clothes, even one image of a body cover and being taken away on a stretcher.

Costa's eye to the world is large, by using these images, where poverty is still there in Portugal a century later, where menial work whose payment varies is everywhere, and an unavoidable amount of discrimination is, unfortunately, still in existence of centuries. Here is the thing though, Costa has no interest in stepping on a soap box and grandstanding about the inhumanity of this as is usually the case in one note political films which succeed in no change. Instead, with figures like Ventura and the others here, they are allowed to blur the lines between their lives and this imagined world, telling of the lives of these figures with greater meaning once you discern what is being spoken of, as Ventura of the protagonist wanders between nocturnal urban environments and septic white hospital environments, coming across the ghosts of his life and even having to finally confront the man he was nearly stabbed to death by and he left unable to work, personified in a red shirt that stands out in this mostly nocturnal and white world. This is not "political" in that it reduces these people to mere examples for rhetoric, but a pluralistic attitude of one's everyday life being examined and learning empathy for those figures and their plights as individual human beings, including all the times when society also plays unfair and loose to people just trying to survive.

A plot thread does not make sense to elaborate on Horse Money, instead a work a series of interconnecting events. That of these migrant workers one man, the lead's godson, is found still waiting in the office of a long gone business, waiting just for his salary and having been there for over twenty years, or of the man in the red shirt who looms over Ventura through until the final scene, where with his arm in a cast, they finally confide and mend their past as Ventura feds the other man soup in a gesture of pure kindness in a hospital dining hall so vast yet entirely empty in the darkness baring those two. And so much where their world is involves merely surviving, as a song briefly heard over tableaux of apartment complexes and peoples' lives talks of people selling their land to go to Lisbon, and working in the rain and wind as cheap labour. A scene of Venture's character and another black African being pursued by two white soldiers in the woodland has uncomfortable connotations as well

Yet again, Costa is not interested in just rhetoric or making an unsubtle comment that this is wrong, when sane people should already realise this. Instead these figures have nobility as the film itself shows an almost monotony of these evils, as these human beings, not just perceived as victims, have to get on with their lives with their own complexities in emotions and how they live. Vitalina Varela's introduction, not an actress either when she was found and cast in the film, is a perfect and sobering example of this. For her monologue, explaining her having to travel to Portugal to attend her husband's funeral, she is not played as a one dimensional victim, but a woman like the viewer, only in the position of needing a Visa to be able to stay in Portugal, and being shoved on an airplane sedated and to the point of soiling herself, all in the context of extreme emotional stress. The monologue, one of the most poignant sequences in the room, does not demean the real life Varela or her character by merely playing her as a victim. She is a human being, but the monologue is even more painful seeing her, this noble figure, express an anecdote of the worst that any person could experience.

The most distinct change to Pedro Costa's career was when he met cinematographer Leonardo Simões, something I will learn the more I see Costa's cinematograpry. I am amazed, whilst it is noticible when you learn this, that the film looks the way it does due to celluloid or a HD digital camera but through a DVX100, a digital camera made available in 2002 and more known for being used by independent filmmakers for work like the documentary Murderball (2005). It works but it feels like the collaborating duo pushes their chosen format to its furthest here. "Chiaroscuro" has been the phrase used to describe Costa's films, an atmospheric look where shadows are deep, and the few scenes in light are stark in how septic they are. Probably the most idiosyncratic touch to realise is that, as already mentioned, Costa is influenced by classic Hollywood cinema.

Whilst Costa's cinema is the utter antithesis of most classic Hollywood productions, closer to Japanese filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu in keeping his camera still, and that the moguls behind those American films probably had polar opposite ideologies, you can feel however both the same sense of grandeur in the aesthetic and also the mood. Just in how Ventura and the cast is depicted, never weak even when his career is bedridden or just wandering the streets at night in underwear and socks, but a striking wanderer and our eyes to the world, seen in how striking the use of minimal light is and how shadows like in old Hollywood movies were used. Likewise, Costa's interest in b-movies has a practical aspiration, as like those films needing to create worlds that sucked their viewers in with minimal budgets, likewise Horse Money feels meticulously crafted from the lights and camera but with mind to being a small budgeted production itself, something he deliberately went to with ideological concerns and he is clearly comfortable with.

It is not necessarily a bleak film either. It feels too relaxed to feel oppressive, closer to melancholy with the world and its suffering. The film also fully embraces the surreal in the scene which won me over, when Ventura finds himself stuck in a lift with a talking statue. It existed in some form before as a separate short, part of an anthology film Centro Histórico (2012), the sequence following an endless moving elevator which feels closer to a nightmare than anything before whilst the statue, a male actor in army fatigues and painted head to toe, is like Legion in that he is many voices speaking from one body. Between talk of fighting for the people, to Ventura keeping behind him as the soldier can still move and has a loaded rifle. Like the title in that short version's form "Sweet Exorcism", this figure forms the ultimate ghost for Venture's character to deal with, having to vanish it from mind to move onwards. Far from a thing of joy, the Carnation Revolution as represented here comes off as an event which would have no assistance for someone like Ventura in real life in the slightest once it has ended in terms of a better life for him, as for all the other black immigrants in the country at the time in the seventies when suddenly the status quo was abruptly overthrown and suddenly work for one day is halted due to a revolution...and life still has to go on, probably still in poverty and isolated still into the modern day. The entire film, which begins with underground medical environments closer to a gothic horror story to leaving them once again at the ending, is to be imagined as a stream-of-consciousness experience and, once embraced for this, is utterly compelling and with meaning as a result, something which desires not a thesis but an analysis of ideas which build emotions instead with greater meaning.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Dreamlike/Methodical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

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1) A 25 April 1974 military coup against the authoritarian Estado Novo regime by a civil resistance campaign, one which was almost entirely bloodless (as the name stems from carnation flowers being placed in soldiers' guns), and had significance in its impact on Portugal losing its African colonies completely and the independence of those countries.