An excerpt from the booklet essay by Jonathan Romney

Writing about Pedro Costa’s Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) in Film Comment, Kent Jones argues that the Portuguese director’s films “have been more lauded than described.” There may be a reason for this - the difficulty of describing these increasingly complex and elusive objects. In another article, Mark Peranson nevertheless makes a case for the necessity of such description: “the most true-to-form analysis of Horse Money should proceed in this painstaking way, shot after shot, because to examine the film as a whole, or as a connection of scenes that flow one into the other, is an impossibility. (Every review of this film is guaranteed to get at least one detail wrong; after seeing it three times the film remains intangible to me.)” One reason for this intangibility, Peranson suggests, is that, “like Jean-Marie Straub, Costa adheres to the philosophical impossibility of matching one shot to the next.”

Whether or not shots fit with each other in Horse Money, sequences barely seem to match sequences: this is a film of formidable discontinuity that takes the form of a dream. Which is not to say that Horse Money represents a dream, simply that it uses the fragmentation and hidden chains of connection that are peculiar to dream logic. The film is all the more perplexing in that it appears, on the surface, to be nothing new: depicting and starring Cape Verdean immigrants, some of them residents of the now-demolished slum area of Fontainhas in Lisbon, Horse Money appears to be a continuation of, even a sequel to, Costa’s 2006 film Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha), also about members of that community. Between the two films, Costa made a number of shorts that are, thematically and formally, in some ways of a piece with the two (among them, Tarrafal, 2007, and O nosso homem, 2010).

At first viewing, I was bowled over by the poetic authority of Horse Money, but a little disappointed that it didn’t seem at first to be much of a stylistic advance on Colossal Youth, returning to that film’s tableau-like compositions and incantatory poetic dialogue (whereas that film was very different in style from Costa’s previous studies of working-class Lisbon - Ossos, 1997 and In Vanda’s Room / No Quarto da Vanda, 2000). However, a second viewing confirms the richness of Horse Money, and makes it clearer to me that it is a very different film to Colossal Youth: a nocturnal, oneiric leaf in a diptych, complementing that film’s fundamental rootedness in daylight realities.

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Complementary to Colossal Youth, Horse Money is in some ways its diametrical opposite: where the former used light, blocks of whiteness, forms redolent of heroic classicism, Horse Money is nocturnal, steeped in sinister chiaroscuro, Romantic. Shooting in boxy Academy ratio, Costa and co-DP Leonardo Simões use diagonals and heightened perspective in a similar fashion, but here to intensely claustrophobic effect, deep-focus corridors shooting into the distance, rooms seeming to close in on people, while the few outside shots feel like interiors (the penultimate shot, with a patch of red sky behind a black building, suggests an Expressionist stage set). Patches of light in darkened rooms seem to have been slashed out of the space with a straight-edge razor. This is a film buzzing with echoes of art history: an Edward Hopper office, corridors like Piranesi’s prisons, night shots in a wood in which foliage and rock have textures reminiscent of Salvator Rosa’s Baroque landscapes. It’s rare to see a film this haunting and this haunted; rarer still that such a film should be deeply and specifically inspired by a current social and economic reality. Horse Money is an inspired reminder that politically rooted cinema needn’t just inhabit the realm of the strictly real; it can have an unconscious too, a dream dimension haunted by ghosts.

Jonathan Romney's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.

Contents
Disc Info


Portugal, 2014
Length / Horse Money:
105 minutes
Length / Special features:
79 minutes
Sound:
DVD: Dolby 5.1 / 2.0 Stereo
Blu-Ray: 5.1 DTS-HD master audio / 2.0 Stereo LPCM (48k/24-bit)
Colour
Original aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Language: Portuguese and Kabuverdianu

DVD: PAL / DVD9 / Region 0
Blu-ray: BD50 / 1080i / 25fps /
Region ABC
DVD: £12.99
Blu-Ray: £19.99
Release Date: 28 Mar 2016

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