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Casa de Lava




Casa de Lava, 1994

A nurse named Mariana (Ines de Medeiros) is tasked with accompanying a comatose worker named Leao (Isaach de Bankhole) back to his home in Cape Verde. Once she arrives, she becomes involved in the strange lives of the locals, including a woman named Edith (Edith Scob) and her son (Pedro Hestnes).

This is a very strange, and intentionally minimalist and abstract movie. It took me a little bit to find the rhythm of the film, but once I got there I really enjoyed it. Right from the beginning, there is talk about the difference between the living and the dead. One of the local boys, a youth named Tano, refers to Leao as "the dead man". Leao seems to have a strange connection to a dog that saves Mariana when she is attacked on the beach.

I saw a review that referenced this as being a "remake" of I Walked with a Zombie. I read this when I was about halfway through the film, and I kind of wish that I had had this thought in mind before I began. There are certainly some supernatural and horror-type images and sequences, and it was in these parts where I most clicked with the film. It's like some interesting (albeit abstract) interpersonal dramas underlaid with a supernatural element.

For me the only real downside was that I had a few times where I felt as if maybe there was a subtext that was going past me. There is something spooky in the film involving a subplot whereby Mariana has dosed several children in the village with vaccinations and many of them fall sick. In another scene, a man asks if it is "his turn" because he wants to die and not have to leave the village. At moments like these, I had the feeling that there might be a political or historical something being referenced. But because the whole film feels highly allegorical, it was sometimes hard to sort out which scenes were meant to be thematic and which were meant to refer to something specific.

I am not very familiar with Pedro Costa's work. Given that he wrote and directed this, I am certainly interested in checking out more of his work.