Cavalo Dinheiro (2014)

Slow, methodic, contemplative cinema is difficult to do—that is difficult to do well, though over the past thirty years Pedro Costa, one of Portugal's foremost auteurs, has proved time and again (O Sangue, Ossos, In Vada's Room, Colossal Youth) that slow and steady works in keeping the audience locked in to what matters most—the essential crisis and emotional turmoil of his gritty, true to life characters, which are affixed perfectly within the framework of the tumultuous social hardships which seemingly afflict the favelas in Lisbon in perpetuity. In Horse Money we again meet Ventura. His sparse white beard is even more haggard than earlier films. Ventura is sick, a retired day laborer, worn down by years of manual labor, Portugal's society, history and most important the ghosts of his own personal history. Thus, the film is set as most slow-burners are: no large and detailed overarching story, no traditional plot. Here, Costa simply begins with a proud, once hardworking man nearing death. Horse Money is a film about reflection, dreams, reconciliation (or not) of one's past actions and about ghosts (though not in an ectoplasmic sense). Watching Horse Money one cannot help, but to think of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, especially Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It is not only the shared use of "ghosts" or "spirits" and how both masters use them, but what Costa accomplishes so very well in transcending time, making now then, then now, and flashbacks which may simply be impressionistic mis-memories by a sick and fevered mind. The story seamlessly transitions from what the viewer can only assume is present day in the film to subtly finding Ventura conversing with a woman who was the wife of a long dead friend, who may or may not still be living herself; from having a checkup with a doctor to a long conversation with a living statue of a soldier as they begin to discuss the Carnation Revolution ; 21st century aging in eternal hospital stays of an old working man to an opaque flashback to the 1970s, where the precise use of partial-reverse illuminative storytelling through the conversations with the "spirits" of Fontainhas-past, reveal a bloody knife fight with his friend Joaquim. Visually Horse Money shifts a bit from what one may call "standard" Costa. All of the sets: hospital, old factory, waiting rooms, tunnels, long corridors, and steps upon steps work in consort with each other building a labyrinthine world for Ventura not only to maneuver through, but that also works as a symbol of a man's life existing as much in his mind as it does in the physical world; again, no difference here. The physicality of Costa's created landscape is not a deviation from his other films, what is different is that these terrains which audiences are accustomed to in Costa's films lack the gritty, naturalism that his physical world often presents. Horse Money's sets lean much more into the realm of the impressionistic, even a kind of Gothic expressionism at times, which stylistically lends itself well to the deathbed-dream quality that permeates nearly every bit of the film. For example: Corridors seem to go on into eternity. The walls glisten with decomposition and mold. The living bronzed soldier-statue which could be something from the mind of Cocteau symbolizes at once the metaphorical past, as well as the physical; all the while darkness seeps to the edges of the hyper-real textures of the set pieces heightening this dreamlike perspective. Costa, as much as any director working today has always shown a propensity for and mastery in his use of shadows and darkness. This quality is amplified in Horse Money. Costa uses darkness and shadows as a way of rethinking aperture framing. Characters are always walking in or out of darkness, always obscured by it in one way or another, a style of peek-a-boo (David Bordwell term) staging and cinematography. Only allowing the audience to see what Costa wants or needs the viewer or Ventura for that matter to see. At times—during the few close-ups Costa employs—faces are elucidated with the darkness around their faces to accentuate this effect, much like directors would in the silent era. But instead of Costa using the darkness around the lit faces in medium and close shots to heighten dramatic effects he uses this to frame the figures like they were set in the fogginess of a dream slowly fading from memory, all the while heightening the intensity in a subtle way, as now the viewer can see the irreversible pain and longing on the faces of Ventura and the ghosts and cannot look away. Such is the power of slow, meditative cinema and such is the power of Horse Money. In the end, Costa's latest piece is one of regret and even nostalgia (in a weird way), inevitability in old age, though not told in the same baroque and ornamental way in which a Paolo Sorrentino would tackle the subject. With Horse Money redemption doesn't appear to be a thought. Life is life and nothing can change that. At the end you are just an old man with a hard lived life—the cards stacked against you—at hand and the ghosts to go along with it. "This life was made to break you." This a line we here in one of the first conversations of the film, a theme Costa has built a strong career on without coming off too broody and melancholic—a perfect balance he has struck indeed. There are many motifs from Costa's oeuvre that find their way into Horse Money: loneliness, disenfranchisement, the rough and tumble lives of the extraordinarily marginalized, restrictive camera angles, rooms, corridors and stairways. So what will haunt you weeks after watching this film? The Ghosts. Normally Costa's ghosts are living—see: In Vada's Room or Ossos. But with Ventura death is inevitable, and only around the next dimly lit corridor and the ghosts, the ghosts are very real.