Horse Money (2014) Difficult, obtuse, but an open mind will see you through (Review)

After a decade of bringing undervalued and overlooked films to light on DVD, Second Run’s career as a big-screen distributor begins, in a winningly perverse fashion, with an elegy. Pedro Costa’s Horse Money adds the fourth instalment to what most people assumed would be a trilogy of films set in the impoverished Lisbon neighbourhood of Fontaínhas. That area has reportedly now been demolished, so Horse Money seems likely to be the last dispatch Costa files from this community.

It begins with Ventura, the mono-named hero of his previous film, being led away by the proverbial man in a white coat. He lies in a hospital bed, talking to some people who seem to be his relatives, recounting stories about being beaten by soldiers during the revolution. He’s talking about this in the present tense, despite the fact that the revolution he’s discussing is Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, which occurred forty years before Horse Money premiered. This is the first of a series of collisions between past and present, culminating in a stunning, extremely unsettling confrontation in a lift.

In its own way, Horse Money is a ghost story, although a better comparison might be Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Like Weerasethakul, Costa is filming an impoverished area of his home country in a way that maximises its strangeness and enchantment rather than any more realist strategy. Also like Weerasethakul, Costa is unafraid to mix his flights of fancy with a serious examination of the scars history has left on this region. Costa’s absurdity is less prominent than Weerasethakul’s more flamboyant weirdness, but there is a deeply creepy, unsettling quality throughout the film. The film’s most memorable character, Vitalina, feels like a psychopomp, a figure in between worlds. She never raises her voice above a whisper as she delivers cryptic epigrams about suffering and poverty: “Blood drips to the floor, but nobody sees the razor.”

After two more conventional films, Costa famously rethought his career when he found Fontaínhas, including adopting digital video so he could work faster and less obtrusively alongside the slum’s residents. His signature composition is a small, illuminated tableau in the middle of a sea of shadow, which feels like it originated as a response to early DV’s limited ability to cope with light differences, but now bears comparison with 18th-century painters like Caravaggio and Wright of Derby.

The viewer might also feel a bit in the dark, given how steeped Horse Money is in Portugal’s history and Costa’s older films. Of the former, it is worth reading up a bit on the Carnation Revolution and the various factions involved before you see it; of the latter, an open mind will be enough to see you through. Horse Money can be a bewildering experience, but every time I felt my patience fraying I was rewarded by another stunning composition, another skin-pricklingly uncanny moment, another inspired use of music or reference to art history.

Of the latter, Costa uses an opening montage of photographs and paintings to rebut the charges of condescension and paternalism that are inevitably aimed at artists who take people poorer and blacker than themselves as subjects. The painting which closes this sequence is Théodore Géricault’s Portrait of a Negro, which Costa holds on for a very long time before panning across to Ventura; the photographs are Jacob Riis’s images of New York poverty. Halfway through the film, Costa cues up a brilliant song by Os Tubarôes – like his leads, Cape Verdeans – and creates a montage of the main characters in obvious homage to Riis’s compositions. Like those characters, he gains a sense of himself through considering where he is in history and reaching out to the past. In Horse Money, the past touches back.

Thanks for reading our review of Horse Money

For more Movie talk, check out our podcast CINEMA ECLECTICA Horse Money featured on Episode 37