I've been waiting for my plane ticket to Portugal for forty years

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...

#28 : Vitalina Varela

Austere, compelling film from Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, following the Cape Verdean immigrant of the title as she makes her way to Lisbon to try and find her errant husband.

Oh good - an austere, compelling film from an "auteur".  It's all gone very, very Guardian for the past however many films it's been now - I wonder when the Adam Sandler "comedies" are going to kick in?  (spoiler alert - there is actually an Adam Sandler film on the list, but thankfully it's not one of his side-splitting efforts).  Anyway, a woman looking for her husband for 2 hours sounds like a right riveting ride, so let's buckle up and get on with it.

I'd have to say it starts well - an intriguing and beautifully shot trail of people out walking at night.  Where are they going?  Oh, they're going home - I guess that makes sense at that time.  But they're doing it very quietly - there are two words of dialogue in the first ten minutes of the film.  All of which leads me to suspect I'm not going to enjoy this...

And wow - just wow.  To say this film is ponderous is only scratching the surface - there are sloths stuck behind it telling it to get a move on.  I would say there is just enough mystery as to what's going on with her husband that I am almost interested in the proceedings, but it's a massive struggle to stay that way.  Jeez, we've just had a scene approximately a minute long of - someone crossing a road.  A road with no cars on it obviously - I'd never have been able to cope with the excitement otherwise.

Right, there's only one thing for it - I'm watching it at double speed.  I kid you not - the film is considerably more enjoyable and a lot of characters actually now seem to be moving at normal speed.  This solution wouldn't work so well if it wasn't subtitled - but it is, so all is good.  Well, I say "good" but I actually mean "less terrible" - the film is still utter bobbins.  It features long periods of either silence or characters talking to themselves - the amount of personal interaction is incredibly low, which makes it almost impossible to care about any of the characters.  

But woah, some excitement - at one hour and forty minutes in, we've had our first shot which is definitely taken during the hours of daylight, with everything up to this point having either been at night or indoors.  And there's some beautiful scenery as well, so it's nice to see it - for the 30 seconds or so before she heads indoors again.  And we get one more outdoors scene at the end of the film featuring the funeral of a character that I'd totally failed to invest in (so much so that I wasn't even sure if we'd seen her before).  And that's it - we're done.  So, you must be dying to know - did it explain what happened to the husband?  I'll give you one guess... 

One thing I would say in its favour is that it's all beautifully shot and lit - every frame looks like it's been carefully planned and could be a picture.  But, there's only so much beautifully shot and lit scenes I can put up with before I want something more like, I don't know, plot, characters or action.  Yes, I know - I'm completely unreasonable.  The acting is fine, I guess - provided you like your acting to involve the choice of stillness or very, very slow movement.

Reading up around the film to see whether any plot actually existed, I was somewhat surprised to find it's based upon the real life story of the lead actress, whose name is actually Vitalina Varela - apparently she appeared in one of the director's previous films and I guess he thought her life story sounded like a good idea for a film.  Well, he was wrong.  End of.  I gave it a quick check on Rotten Tomatoes and was completely unsurprised to see that the critics loved it but the general public were less keen - and I imagine very few people even bothered starting to watch it at all.  The user reviews on IMDB are quite amusing - one is titled "Why bother?" and I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would stick with this to the end and without the double speed option I struggle to imagine I'd have made it there.  Just avoid.

At the time of writing, the film is not available to watch on any of the normal streaming channels.  Which is good, because if I find out that any of you have even attempted to search for this, I'm going to have to have some serious words with you.

#29 - A challenging watch with an incredible lead performance
#27 - A watchable and enjoyable film - about time too.