There is a constant dialogue between form, style, and content that flows and grows throughout all Costa’s filmography. If with No Quarto da Vanda Costa had got rid of the narrative structure still vaguely present in Ossos, in Juventude em Marcha, third of what’s been called the Letters from Fontaínhas trilogy, he elevates the documentary nature to the lyrical stylisation that will keep on being explored through Cavalo Dinheiro and Vitalina Varela.
The estrangement of Pedro Costa’s characters in the architectural brutalism of the new district they have been relocated to, provides the intense emotional base on which Juventude em Marcha is built. I have seen Vanda as a teenager, then as a gaunt young woman addicted to heroin, now a mature lady with little to do except for . . . waiting, essentially. She is a survivor. And yet, seeing her, or Ventura, in what as a matter of fact is a better, healthier environment, doesn’t feel as reassuring as it should. I rather see a bunch of people removed from their roots, however rotten the ground they were in. And I see them lost, their future filled with a somehow emptier vacuum.
Striking are the shots where a seemingly aimless Ventura wanders through a maze of bright imposing blocks under a pitch black sky despite the blinding sun, or the the family portrait of a motherly Vanda and her daughter in a room that seems not theirs, and to some extent isn’t. ‘Mama just wants to raise you, then I can die . . . mama is sick . . . mama doesn’t think she can raise you,’ says Vanda to her little girl sitting on a bed that no matter how clean and neat, still looks like the same old dead end.
