IN VANDA’S ROOM / NO QUARTO DA VANDA

The second in his Fontainhas trilogy, IN VANDA’S ROOM follows heroin addict Vanda Duarte and a group of struggling slum dwellers as they try to make a life amid the demolition of their Lisbon neighborhood. Between Vanda’s raucous coughing fits and the clicks of her butane lighter, Costa’s extreme long takes, filmed in austere digital video, capture the sound of her built environs collapsing around her. Unlike the Barcelona neighborhood in EN CONSTRUCCIóN, though, Fontainhas was wiped from the map by city officials, irredeemable in the eyes of the state, its inhabitants moved elsewhere. Today, it no longer stands, but remains embalmed in the images of Costa’s film.

IN VANDA’S ROOM probes the limit of what cinema is and is capable of, not only in its content, which is bleak and harrowing to be sure, but in its form. Like many films in this series, it is uninterested in the distinction between fiction and documentary, choosing instead to capture life in its essence by whatever means necessary. André Bazin wrote that photography, and by extension cinema, satisfied the deep need that man had for an image that was not an approximation, but was the object itself, “freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” Sometimes, truth must be freed from the conditions of the objectively real: Costa proclaimed that he filmed some scenes multiple times until they “became fluidly represented and detached of any melodramatic tone.” Often, truth requires some coaxing.

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