How uneasy it is to observe Vanda’s life through a lens that more than ever takes the shape of a peephole. And what a strange feeling going back to mine after having somehow experienced hers.
Clearing my throat to say nothing. Feeling cold because it’s late, or warm after putting on a jumper. Drinking water. Anything I do echos what I have just seen on screen and goes further, deep into my own memories—those little gestures, the routine, unbearable and comforting at once.
Costa’s dantesque semidocumentary portrait can’t but have a different impact on anyone who suffered from some form of addiction. In the core, they are all the same. And they all make feel as some old constructions are being demolished, havoc eating and closing in. But the annihilation Costa tells of has a broader meaning—social, cultural, equally physical, and global. Through dust and cracks and doors ajar, No Quarto da Vanda lets a pale light in, on the deprived population of shantytowns. It takes us to the forbidden rooms of the unwanted who get removed like dirt from the floor or, thinking of a striking image from the film, like dried wax from a table. Well, they exist.
Vanda’s misery made me cringe—for her, for me. Perhaps I felt a sense a guilt, or relief. I am alive and sound, but what about her, them. It is what we want, says Vanda to a friend, to do drugs. But it’s what we are bound to want, says he raising the ominous side of determinism that always scared me. And yet there’s some sort of distorted poetry in it, and in Costa’s stunningly brutal work. Intimidating and brilliant, addictive in itself.
