Our Man (2010)

a.k.a. O Nosso Homem

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cannon Fodder

[Cannon Fodder covers work by creators that have had entries on the Abstract List, or of immense worth for myself, to which we delve into this short film from Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa]

A hang out for rats and lizards.

Our Man begins with a mother and an adult son discussing about moving back to Cabo Verde. The mother is wrapped up and sat up in bed, the son with dreadlocks and wearing a red shirt and coat, and they end up on a discussion about a creature, a man who slips a letter into a person's pocket. They have to go with him then, to which he will bore a hole in their head and suck out their blood. This evokes M.R. James' Casting of Runes, an evocative short story from the English author, adapted as Night of the Demon (1957), in which a slip of symbolled paper slipped onto a person's being without them knowing will curse them to being pursued by a horrifying demon. Knowing Costa's love for classic Hollywood cinema, I would not be surprised he knows of the film adaptation at least, directed by Jacques Tourneur who also helmed I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a film he had planned to remake as Casa de Lava (1994) before it became his own creation.  

Suffice to say, jumping to the ending, he turns James' premise to a profound final image, an expulsion letter to leave Portugal, nailed to a pillar with a knife in a striking final shot. If Costa ever felt he could make an actual genre film, which he nearly did with Casa de Lava originally, he would make one now that would deal with the lives of the poverty class and migrant communities from this perspective of a world that acts aliens to them.

Our Man can be seen in itself an epilogue to a trilogy of films set at the Fontainhas quarter, an area in Lisbon slim that Costa came to and has to the modern day held in such respect. The opening, set in a small shack near the city in the distance, eventually cuts to the face of regular cast member Ventura, Costa's key figure here encountering a friend who has been kicked out the house and divorced because he lost his work, and cannot make any money. Desperate enough to bring home an old, wounded dove for dinner, the segment (and most of this short) is Ventura helping this friend, Our Man a snapshot of ordinary lives playing out.

One where there is no major plot, just snippets. Where Suzete, the wife who got her husband to sign a divorce bill without him realising, is lamented over by her ex-husband slumped over a table whilst drunk with Ventura and another male friend who works in a school kitchen, not able to gave them anything else but soup as they only have enough food for the kids. Both stories do cross, as the son, Jose, meets these older men, all whilst witnessing the failed attempt to catch rabbits by hitting bushes with a stick whilst drunk. The banality of life is witnessed, that for these immigrants to Portugal they still have to live, even if anecdotes include being beaten by a group of white men, or being in an open prison when one's father had died, allowed out to help bury the body. Life must still go on regardless.

In fact, befitting the reference to M.R. James, it becomes apparent Ventura has been communicating to a ghost, conversing of not having his gold tooth used to pay for his funeral or joking a passing cat is a rabbit. Costa, as mentioned, has never made a genre film, but he has not either shied away from the unnatural and surreal, even describing the future film Horse Money (2014) as a horror film in its own right, even having Ventura trapped in a lift talking to a living statue alive with countless voices challenging him like a Legion demon.

Our Man offers in itself a fragment of Pedro Costa, these short films in danger of being marginalised in a creator's career but, especially in this case, as worthy to witness as this feels like a piece that interconnects to the others. Whilst not as evocative aesthetically, and with the surprise of how bright open environments stand out in his cinema from his usual nocturnal locations, this does show how Costa was moving in style. The film before this was Colossal Youth (2006), the first for the director with cinematographer Leonardo Simões.  The pair, alongside actors like Ventura who contribute to these films as much, would follow up with two films in the 2010s (Horse Money and Vitalina Varela (2019)) which took this film's empathetic worldview but also include an even greater sense of nocturnal atmosphere. Our Man as a result is able to exist as a chapter in this vast book known as Pedro Costa's entire filmography, as well as be the building blocks from a pre-existing veteran to work from for his new stage of work.