Horse Money is the sixth feature film from Portuguese director Pedro Costa, the fourth installment in a loose group of films tied together by their connection to the Fontainhas district of Lisbon. Fontainhas was a poor neighbourhood with a population largely made up of immigrants from former Portuguese colonies, where Costa began filming in the late 1990s. Around that time the district was being demolished by the Portuguese government, and Horse Money is the second of Costa’s films to deal with the subsequent displacement of its residents.
The film follows Ventura, an elderly man caught in a state of limbo: between the living and the dead, the past and the present, freedom and internment. He wanders the corridors of a facility somewhere between a psychiatric hospital, a military prison and a rogue scientist’s dungeon. At no point are we sure exactly who he is, where he is, or why he’s there; nor are we sure if he knows any of these things himself. This lack of a secure reference point makes us feel lost, uncomfortable, irritable: all emotions written on Ventura’s face at various points in the film. His occasional moments of clarity and purpose, unexplained as they are, serve to push the audience further into the dark.
The slow, non-linear style of Costa’s direction and Leonardo Simões cinematography is matched by the slow, steady movement and inward-looking demeanour of Ventura himself. The film displays the patience Costa has towards his subject and subject matter, and in turn requires patience from the viewer. There are lots of long, still shots of faces, hands, and statues, accompanied by tortuously irritating ambient sounds, such as footsteps, trouser cords rubbing together, and beads swishing. People move and speak at their own pace, which is, for the most part, very slowly. It is mainly filmed inside in the dark, or outside at night, which adds to the claustrophobic feeling and the craving for light, movement, action and information. On one occasion the heavy atmosphere is broken by a sudden burst of Spanish guitar, and the break of tension was so welcome I almost laughed.
Horse Money may be difficult, in the sense of being confusing or demanding, but it is not totally obscure – it offers a way into its subject through emotion rather than analysis, and it packs a serious emotional punch. As we journey with Ventura through the Kafka-esque twists and turns of his new existence, his hands constantly shaking from an unidentified “nervous disease” and his dealings with his environment becoming more and more absurd, we acknowledge his humanity, and we sympathise with him. Not only with him, but with lives disrupted by migration, poverty, conflict, and sickness. Through a loosely related series of encounters, connections are made between Ventura’s past and his current state, and by the end of the film quite a fleshy picture of his world and the economic, historical and social forces that created it has been built up.
The most striking thing about the film is the lighting. Dramatically lit statues shine out of the darkness like spectres, and even Ventura himself at times looks like a ghost, his face lit from beneath as he speaks to his friend, yellow lights in highrise apartment windows twinkling above them like stars. At other points Costa uses carefully considered camerawork to transform the sunlight filtering through factory windows into artwork on the walls. Love it, hate it, or (most likely) simply grapple with it, this isn’t a film that will be easily forgotten.
Horse Money currently showing in the IFI.
