CINEMA
Lisbon, Mostly in Dark Shades
Ruin and redemption among Portugal’s immigrants
BY STEVE ERICKSON
If Rembrandt or Vermeer were
fi lmmakers, they would have
made Pedro Costa’s “Vitalina
Varela.” Costa really is working
at that level of artistic accomplishment.
But his project as a
fi lmmaker since his 1997 “Ossos”
has been inseparable from his
commitment to depicting Lisbon’s
Fontainhas neighborhood and the
scars of Portugal’s colonial legacy.
The trilogy of fi lms he made there,
working with non-professional actors
and strong elements of documentary,
gradually brought him
to international attention. None of
them got a commercial release in
the US, but Criterion released the
trilogy as a box set.
“Vitalina Varela” begins with
a few scenes showing a bed with
bloody sheets and the funeral of
the man who died in it. Three days
later, his widow Vitalina Varela
No Gig To Write Home About
Ken Loach not up to his standard in tale of new economy woes
BY STEVE ERICKSON
British director Ken Loach’s
work is generally
admirable, even sometimes
great, but “Sorry
We Missed You” is a major misfi re.
Picture a Labour Party MP attempting
to write an ‘80s American
TV movie, with all the clichés,
awkward family drama, and implicit
cultural conservatism intact
but trying very hard to push its
overt politics to the left. Back in
the 1940s, Italian neo-realism succeeded
by concealing its seams.
Vittorio de Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves”
and Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome,
Open City” are melodramas thinly
disguised as near-documentary
naturalism. (Indeed, gay director
Luchino Visconti immediately
took the fi eld toward an operatic
treatment of working-class lives.)
Vitalina Varela in Pedro Costa’s fi lm named for the actor.
Loach’s work, which began for
the BBC in the 1960s, picked up
that torch. At his best, he’s been
able to combine emotional and political
substance. But the tale of a
delivery worker’s life in “Sorry We
Missed You” drops the package at
the wrong gate.
Ricky (Kris Hitchen) has a job
interview in the fi lm’s fi rst scene.
But he doesn’t realize the exploitative
nature of his new job delivering
packages. He’s not actually
the boss of his own independent
franchise. Promised the freedom
to make his own hours, he has to
work every day to make a meager
living, while his wife Abby (Debbie
Honeywood) is similarly burdened
as a home caregiver to elderly
people. Left to raise himself, their
teenage son Seb (Rhys Stone) becomes
obsessed with graffi ti and
gets in trouble. Ricky’s options become
COURTESY: NICO CHAPIN/ CMPR
ever more constricted as his
job never gives him a break while
fi ning him for the slightest infraction
and treating every inability to
work as his responsibility.
The weaknesses of this fi lm
mostly stem from long-term Loach
collaborator Paul Laverty’s
script. Its scope is awfully narrow,
almost blinkered. One of the fi rst
scenes shows a long shot of the
warehouse where Ricky works, but
his colleagues are depicted only in
relation to his life. I’m sure this is
intentional. Driving a truck delivering
packages all day is socially
isolating. But the fi lm wants to
make a defi nitive statement about
the damaging effects of gig work,
while only showing a tiny slice of
British life. One key scene tells us
that Ricky and Abby’s jobs have
made it impossible for the family
to have dinner together on Saturday.
(the actor uses her real name, and
the fi lm’s story is based on her own
experiences) arrives in Lisbon from
the former Portuguese colony of
Cape Verde, an island off the coast
of Africa, for the fi rst time. She had
planned to join him for decades but
never been able to. Varela becomes
part of a community of Black immigrants
but never quite fi ts in.
She pieces together the details of
his life. When she meets a disillusioned
priest suffering from Parkinson’s
disease (Ventura), both of
them feel much less lonely.
In a review of Clint Eastwood’s
“Richard Jewell,” critic Uncas
Blythe suggested that Costa has
used his depictions of marginalized
people as a “career commodity.” A
few years ago, I spoke with a director,
praising her fi lm by comparing
it to Costa’s “In Vanda’s Room”; she
demurred, telling me that she ad-
➤ PEDRO COSTA, continued on p.27
Without being at all untrue,
“Sorry We Missed You” develops a
critique of capitalism based mostly
around its corrosive effects on the
nuclear family that far-right populists
could also buy into enthusiastically.
Hitchen and Honeymead’s performances
are quite believable.
She convincingly captures the
emotions of a woman gradually realizing
that she’s expected to tolerate
and know how to cope with
the extremes of aging and mental
illness simply because she is a
woman. She has a big heart, but
this allows her to get exploited and
used. The cast does not consist of
non-professional actors, but Loach
and casting agent Kathleen Crawford
chose unfamiliar faces with
relatively little experience rather
➤ KEN LOACH, continued on p.27
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