The world in Colossal Youth looks as if ash has blocked out the sun; not the sun that shines outside, although in the passages and alleys there too it is dim and festered, but rather it is the light on the inside that has turned to gloom. This is the light of the slums, and with the blinding, harsh whiteness of new lower-class State housing in Lisbon, Pedro Costa’s film is, first and foremost, a literal study of visual contrast. In front of the housing projects or inside their empty apartments the figure of Ventura (Ventura) is immense and imposing, his dark skin and black suit cutting angular shapes out of the rectilinear oppression. Back in the slums, he tends to blend into the decrepitude, into shadows that look and feel as if they have darkened the same corner for eons. Ventura still expresses the same weight, the same burdens of an unseen past, the same introspection and deep-set bewilderment, but this weight of character only seems to fit in when it wraps itself within the shadows of the shantytown. In a particularly memorable scene, Ventura and a daughter of his look off-screen and describe what seems to be the shapes, figures, and stories they see in the murk of the wall opposite, as someone would spot animals in clouds floating above. There is a social—and human—history so evident even off-screen in the slums, and one that possibly is in the process of literally being whited out by the future.

The film opens with Ventura’s wife—or, as he says, maybe a woman who is like her—throwing him and his belongings out of his room in the slums of Fontaínhas, an event that coincides with the old housing being torn down and its residents assigned apartments in the epically pristine State housing. From this point on the rest of the movie, like a darker, ghost story version of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, is a series of impromptu visits Ventura pays on his various children. If they are indeed his children (the precise relationships between nearly every character and Ventura are vague), than every one is by a different mother, and, at least at first, discombobulated by his homelessness and the rejection of his woman, Ventura can barely remember which one belongs to whom. The daughter he first talks to says he has the wrong house, the wrong daughter, and the second daughter he talks to (Vanda Duarte) reminds him that her mother has been dead for years. This sort of uncertainly about both space and time strictly in terms of personal, human history is continuous through Colossal Youth. For example, it often seems like Ventura is paying his children a visit for the first time in years (or, more poetically and radically, that his specter is more a ghost than a living person), just as Costa’s cramped framing and disembodied apartments all seem like they are in the same vicinity but never connect up in a larger establishment of space. Everyone, everything, and every space seems to float there on its own, new, used or worn down through time. Ventura passes from space to space, person to person, past to past, with an aimless quality as if he were trying to add everything up by his mere presence, connecting the dots—his family, and from that himself—just by appearing on people’s doorsteps. The State offers Ventura (and his wife, in absentia) a new room in the projects, which Ventura impassively surveys and demands more rooms for his children. We do not know it yet, but this gathering under one roof will never happen. Back at the squalid shack of the friend that Ventura is staying with while he contacts his children and finds housing, the aging man composes a love letter to the distant wife of his temporarily roommate (Alberto Barros), but refuses to write it down and instead demands, through repetition, that his friend learn it learn it by heart. Emblematic of the film's cryptic temporality and spatial continuity, the scenes with the roommate seem to sometimes take place in flashback (to a time when Ventura was employed) but also perhaps on the islands of Cape Verde, as it is unclear whether workers from the islands are in the Fontaínhas slums or the other way around. The long remove of this heartrending recitation is the most moving of the film’s evocation of Ventura’s disconnection from his family, from a sense of home, and from his sense of self nurtured by his past and his kin.

Pedro Costa’s forlorn, austere film uses little camera movement, strict framing emphasizing small, enclosed living spaces, natural shadows, the texture of grain and darkness from his digital camera, silence, empty or still frames, and long, story-like monologues to express the desolation of Lisbon slums and the confused spiritual search of the film’s wayward, nearly passive protagonist. Almost invisibly blending documentary elements with fictional—as people like Ventura and Vanda Duarte were actual residents of the area, and many of the stories Ventura’s children tell are autobiographical—Costa lends a elegiac tone of monumentality, patience, and compassion to the banal and generally unseen or unexpressed lives of the slum residents, replete with drug addictions, haphazard work, distant and separated families, unpleasant pasts, and uncertain futures. Colossal Youth gives as much weight to the physical presence of its characters—be it the often-posed stoicness of Ventura, even while relaxing, or someone like Duarte’s sublimely natural inhabitation of her State apartment bedroom—as it does to the power of the children’s drawn-out stories and the camera’s emblematic, minimalist evocation of living spaces. Vanda Duarte’s epic story of the birth of her daughter, for instance, is amazing as it weaves between comedy, banality, suffering, fortitude, family resilience and love, but it is complimented by the strangeness of realizing that Ventura, listening periodically actively and impassively, does not know the story of his granddaughter’s birth, as well as Duarte’s bedroom interaction with her daughter and Ventura’s fidgety, uncomfortable position on her bed as she tells her tale. The contrast between her sparsely furnished and glaringly white bedroom of her State apartment and the personal detail and wavering emotional re-telling of her story forms yet another of the film’s masterful contrasts within its visual texture and human compassion, the struggle of people to hold themselves up and together despite their situation, a struggle Ventura faces throughout the film. From these kind of scenes Colossal Youth by and large successfully navigates away from the pretensions its formal monumentality can imply, and instead captures the living grandeur, weight, history, desolation, and ingrained, unspoken emotions of even the most everyday of things, people, and spaces.