The film's main character is the 60-year old Ventura, a working class Cape Verdean immigrant. He's playing a highly stylized version of himself in situations drawn from his own life, developed in conversations with his friend Costa. Ventura was the star of Costa's last film, "Colossal Youth," and although Costa has suggested that Ventura, never a professional actor anyway, probably doesn't have any more movies left in him, one hopes that they will continue to work together, because theirs is one of the great actor-director collaborations in recent cinema.
The intervening years since their last film together have not been kind to Ventura. He (or the character? is there a difference?) has a nerve disease that makes his hands shake. Where he seemed mysterious and implacable, rock-like at times, in much of "Colossal Youth," here he seems mostly regretful and anxious and often terrified. His lack of vanity as he confronts his own physical decline verges on heroic. There is no vanity in this performance.
Even if there were, though, Costa's filmmaking would've undercut it. He shoots Ventura's face, and the faces of all the other actors, in tight closeups and in harshly lit long shots that emphasize the shapes of their bodies and the creases in their faces. Tears well up in Ventura's eyes as he lingers in the pitch-black halls and rooms of an unnamed mental hospital, occasionally leaving and being brought back by authorities. There are other inmates in there with him. A group of inmates appears, materializes almost, by his bedside early on. They share their own life stories. They are laborers, criminals. They are the dispossessed, the oppressed.
Ventura is tripping down memory lane to such a degree that he seems to be suffering from dementia, but it might just be a Willy Loman or "The Singing Detective" type of situation—heavy on metaphorically ripe scenarios, but less affected than a stage play or time-jumping film might be, because the past is described verbally but not envisioned in flashback. In one scene, Ventura tells a doctor that he is a teenager and has been taken to the hospital by the the MFA, the Portuguese revolutionary army ended the African colonial war and won independence for Cape Verde. In a lot of Ventura's monologues, he thinks he is 19, or that it's 1975.
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