Film

When it premiered at Cannes in 2006, Pedro Costa’s minimalist mural of urban decay immediately split festival attendees into two camps: those who walked out of screenings by the dozens, declaring it the ultimate in pretentious world-cinema wanking, and those who championed the movie as a paragon of a type of filmmaking devoted to molasses-speed meditativeness. Both reactions are understandable, and if you have no patience for immobile 15-minute shots in which characters just sit on a bed kvetching, this isn’t for you. We suggest you check out Transformers at the multiplex down the street. (Honestly, that’s not a dig. Different strokes for different folks.) But if you are able to slow down to Colossal Youth’s deliberate rhythms, there’s a strong chance you’ll be dragged in by the film’s undertow and resurface completely mesmerized.

Like Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman before him, Costa favors amassing quotidian, almost banal details and letting things unfold in real time. Long—make that looong—takes and low angles are the norm, while the elderly protagonist (the single-named Ventura) shares the movie’s penchant for wandering. Acting as the father figure to a ramshackle housing project’s populace, he’s willing to hover spectrally in the room of a recovering addict (Duarte), memorize a letter an immigrant laborer wants to send to a sweetheart or search for his own estranged daughter. These vignettes aren’t random encounters so much as pieces of a bigger picture regarding social breakdown. Epiphanies aren’t guaranteed, but the cumulative result will assuredly add converts to Costa’s rapidly growing cult.