You're too late. Your husband died three days ago. His house is not yours. Go back. There's nothing for you.
Yet, Vitalina Varela keeps on moving. Her feet descending the stairs of the airplane, slowly one after another. She has been waiting for the plane ticket to Portugal for 40 years, where her husband resided all this time.
The husband has been living in agony and sickness. In his last days, he was throwing up all the time, vomiting blood. Vitalina approaches his abode. An equally sickly decaying place — loose cement coating falls off from the walls, holes in the roof. The house she and her husband built in Cape Verde by their very own hands many years ago is much better and not a crumbling mess like this at all. People move from her way, seeing her. They mutter under their breath. Not many recognize her. There are rumors in the air.
Not all of them are sightseers, some of these villagers helped her husband in his last hours. Changed his blood-stained clothes, fed him. Buried him when he died. The same drunkards who were his friends.
Where was Vitalina? Why she didn't come all these years and why now?
Questions are not easily answered in the film. Not because it dilly-dallies around it trying to be mysterious, no — rather it relies heavily on visual storytelling. There's not much talking. There's not much movement either.
As the story progressed, I came to see the hauntingly poignant tale Costa portrays.
The lives of this little village are stagnant. People stare at things for hours, without objecting. They live and die silently like a community of mutes. It's hard to procure food. Living is hard, making an effort often yields nothing. No one comes to prayer house anymore. The priest shiver under the weight of passing suns.
I wonder how alien this life might be, to many other people in the upper class, especially young ones, with self-centered dreams. Their petty complaints and regrets. It's tormenting to try to put myself in a place in between, doing so I find myself writhing in existential pain in the reality of Vitalina Varela. Why prolong this dreadful agony? Why shall I go on?
The life I could have had and the life I left for naught but misery.
The film is haunting to see as well. I see deliberation in Costa's cinematography. Almost none of the frames are entirely lit. Frames have focused light that is illuminating mostly the subject. The environment and the set are often lost in the darkness. This forces the audience to focus on the characters as they're supposed to. This persistence with light and shadow doesn't let go of the desolation it wants to embrace.
It's quite a hard film to start, to sit through. But if you can, it fills you with an emptiness that is not your own.
Another one of my top 10 of 2019.
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