Casa De Lava (1994)

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cast: Inês de Medeiros as Mariana; Isaach De Bankolé as Leão; Edith Scob as Edite; Pedro Hestnes as Edite's Son; Cristiano Andrade Alves as Tano; António Andrade as Kilim; Daniel Andrade as Nhelas; Manuel Andrade as Tcheka; Raul Andrade as Bassoé

Abstract List Candidate

 

It's strange. No one comes back. Every day I see them leave, but they never return.

For his second feature film, Pedro Costa originally wanted to remake Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Likewise however, this is the film when you see the schism unfold from his debut Blood (1989), a good film but one with is very conventionally told, whilst Casa De Lava plants the seeds for his future career, immediately seen as the film progresses. On camera you can see this but even behind it, it was his interactions with the locals of the Cape Verde Islands that would eventually lead him to Fontainhas, the real life location back in Portugal where people he met in Cape Verde passed him gifts to take to the Lisbon based community. It is also in the film itself, as one of the major subplots has male musicians soon travelling to Portugal to become labourers, all in spite of Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) warning them there is no life there. This feels as a result like a prologue, the origin story, of his later films as it was for his career, beginning in the location where these figures originally came from.

Bluntly, Costa would jettison the white outsider character we have here as a protagonist, a nurse named Mariana who comes to the islands with a local Leão (Isaach De Bankolé), left in a deathless coma for two months after a fall at his work at a construction site as a labourer. She is like in so many films the white stand-in in films from the West meant to be our safety net and introduction to other peoples' worlds. This is harsh but a truthful comment to make, especially as Pedro Costa drastically shifted this film from its initial premise as a remake of a Val Lewton production, which was originally meant to have been his genre film with ghosts and the looming volcano the location is built upon. This would begin where his later films like Horse Money (2014) would come from, collaborations with their casts about their actual lives, and with no need for an outsider figure.

Even in Casa De Lava Mariana does not dominate the film though her character is of importance. She comes to the islands from Portugal, and begins to change. It is also explicit how she is an outsider, frankly out of custom to the world she has set herself up in. Her contrast is Edith, played by the legendary actress Edith Scob who has been there to the point she has forgotten Portuguese and only speaks Creole, part of the world fully as a local. Notably as well, whilst we follow the story of Mariana, waiting by Leão's side as he lays still in his bed, this film does not make the same decision to marginalise its local cast in their own story like other productions have, but enfolds their own narratives alongside Mariana's. Again, Costa would drastically change his cinema over a couple of decades, but the DNA of this change can be found here.

What was also clear was how much was distinct to this production. Beginning with grainy footage of a volcano erupting, in this community living under its presence and in places beneath their feet, this world comes off as an idyllic place even if under a still, contemplative eye by cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel, whose work includes Robert Bresson's final film L'Argent (1983). Mainly because, whilst the film shows this world to have many problems, the vibrancy of the community is seen in just how colourful the clothing is, in all the colours of the rainbow, or how mainly set in the day, there is a drastic shift in tone from the future films "chiaroscuro" cinematography with this one's light filled setting. Arguably, it is one of Pedro Costa's most colourful films for how the environment and creative decisions like Mariana's red dress, to aspects naturally of the locations like green painted houses with painted doors.

Likewise, there is more emphasis on brightness to these lives even as the film hints at far more troubling issues along the way. A lot more lightness is to be seen in spite of everything, alongside the greater emphasis on music but having characters being musicians. If darkness is still there, it is deliberately vague. Leão's coma is unexplained, and there are incidents like Mariana being attacked by a young boy on the beach which are startling, warning you not all is what it seems. There are forms hiding in the community, and where people are found injured or in a state of deathless sleep, it slowly burns to a point. That this region was a former Portuguese colony is felt as an undercurrent - Edith has immersed herself in this country as an outsider, conversing with the local women as one of their own and a close friend, secretly stronger than her initial appearance suggests. Her adult son looks out of place and is hostile to the locals like an outsider.

Casa De Lava, whilst not what it was, arguably still has the tension of a horror story, particularly with the tone that is as much a veil over real life human complexity. Something is not right in this place, whilst still more idyllic than the slum community men from this community will move to another country. The environment has layers felt both from that night time attack on the beach and a beloved dog being found dead on the beach. Cape Verde is still a beautiful place but it has problems, where young boys are drinking and there has been a lot of men sleeping around for decades, as many of the women (even as teenagers) can have up to twenty children. Mariana is not exactly the knight here to help either, the film negative to the credulous idea of the white saviour. Built on volcanic land, the geography is itself an apt metaphor for the problems under the surface, that like an actual volcano no one person is able to fix by himself or herself.

As the prologue to the later Fontainhas films, you have a tale explaining why people migrated to Portugal, but then there is not necessarily the tonic to heal oneself either, leading to those future films having a theme of perseverance despite how bleak they can become. Even in terms of this film's plot, the sense of a greater existential pain is felt far before those later films. I mean, played by a young Isaach De Bankolé, we never know Leão ended up in the coma. He fell from a great height at a construction site but never why. As a result, Casa De Lava hides a lot, pretty much signposting the fissure between Costa's debut Blood, which was admirably subtle already in depicting its plot points, to fully rejecting commercial storytelling in the future. The actual ending, whilst with obvious points, is elusive and the only real point learnt is that Mariana finds herself having been manipulated. Edith's son is [Major Spoiler] snatched away, whilst his mother Edith lives in the community happy as ever, bonding with the women in feminist sisterhood. Life has to go on, as the men migrate to find paying work, and we never have any real answers, the horror origins of the production in that whatever force leaves children injured or collapsing in the wilderness in a daze is mysterious. Costa's story, in vast contrast, was clear and growing layers as this great film in his career was a catalyst for a drastic shift in his work too.

Abstract Spectrum: Elusive/Quiet

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