CASA DE LAVA / DOWN TO EARTH (1994)

This post is part of the second Luso World Cinema Blogathon.

CASA DE LAVA / DOWN TO EARTH (1994) begins explosively. Red lava tumbles down a pitch black hillside, and then suddenly more bursts upward from the volcano. The main setting of the movie is Cape Verde (Cabo Verde in Portuguese), an island country off the western coast of Africa and a former colony of Portugal. Volcanoes created the archipelago of ten islands comprising the country. The opening scenes could serve as a reminder of the place’s birth, but maybe not. The film is full of repressed emotions wreaking havoc when they’re acted on or at least finally expressed.

The next scenes introduce us to some of the women of Cape Verde. We meet the first woman from behind. A breeze moves her wild tendrils of dyed blonde hair. Then we get to see their faces as they gaze back at the camera. Some of the women look African; others look mixed race; and some strongly look Portuguese. These are the women left behind when their men leave the island for work in Portugal. They will wait for love letters and hope they contain remittances for themselves and their children.

Next the film cuts to a group of Cape Verdean men on a construction site in Lisbon. Their playful chatter as they leave the breakroom isn’t translated for us. Lead actor Isaach De Bankolé playing Leão is introduced to us as one of the group. He wears a smile on his face and a sweater with a hole, a hint at the hardship of a bachelor performing manual labor for cheap pay in a foreign country. When we next see him at the worksite, his smile has vanished and been replaced by a moody, absent look. He’s standing at the edge of scaffolding.

Leão’s fall isn’t shown. The audience is never sure if he jumped, slipped, or fainted, but any of these things is a possibility. We do see his alarmed, older co-worker informing an unseen person that Leão fell and is unconcious. This act drives all that subsequently happens in the movie. After lying comatose for two months, the hospital sends Leão back to his homeland, a reverse immigration that never happens after other Cape Verdean men leave. It’s not that they might not want to return, but the question is whether they can afford to. An anonymous sponsor from Cape Verde sends the hospital the money to ship Leão back.

Since he’s unfit to travel alone, he’ll be accompanied by a nurse. Inês de Medeiros (billed as Inês Medeiros) plays that nurse, named Mariana. She’s surrounded by associations with the Virgin Mary. To start her name is a variation of Mary. Also, she works in a hospital name Santa Maria (St. Mary’s). As a nurse, she’s a mothering figure attempting to deliver her patients from illness to wellness. She’s chaste, a virgin for most of the film. Her name Mariana hints that once she pursues romance, it will only lead to unhappiness. The most famous Portuguese Mariana is a nun rumored to have been loved and left by a French officer. She’s alleged to have written him a series of letters starting from lovelorn and ending resolute.

When Mariana and Leão land on the island of Fogo, which means fire in Portuguese, no one is waiting for them. Mariana brought no suitcase with her. She was expecting to hand Leão off to his family and immediately return to Portugal. Since she can’t abandon her charge, she finds herself stuck in an unfamiliar looking land, where she knows no one and where she doesn’t speak the language. The official language of Cape Verde is Kriolu, a Portuguese-based creole. She has seven days to find Leão’s family. That’s when she’ll be able to catch the next flight home.

Mariana secures a ride into Leão’s village, but once there no one in the small community will claim to know him. It’s hard to know what prompts their reticence. Do they not tell her because she’s a foreigner and an outsider? As one of only two white women in the village, she sticks out, and everywhere she goes everyone already knows her name. Do they not tell her because she’s Portuguese? Cape Verde achieved independence from Portugal in 1975, but the legacies of colonization and slavery were long felt. Do they not tell her because they are too weary and overburdened to claim a body most refer to as dead? The village mainly consists of women and old men. Any remaining young men are about to depart the country or are trying to leave

In the film, there’s a weariness to both the Cape Verdean and Portuguese characters. Culturally both countries share the concept of saudade. The word describes a melancholy born out of longing or nostalgia. Lost loves, past places, events, or other memories can haunt as well as what was desired but never possessed or experienced. It’s easy to see how saudade could impact Cape Verdeans based on their history and what they’ve overcome, but the word existed in written texts in Portugal prior to the fifteenth century–before the Age of Discovery separated families sometimes permanently, before the loss of empire, before the decline in world standing in trade and politics, and before Portugal lost waves of its own citizens in an economics inspired diaspora. Saudade was part of the Portuguese character before all of these events, a “Portuguese way of life”, although the trait increased in prominence after them.

Saudade is expressed as a kind of fatalism in the film. Leão’s Lisbon doctor is so sympathetic to Leão’s plight, the doctor sounds depressed as he relates every overwhelming aspect of Leão’s predicament to his staff. The Cape Verdean men know they must leave if they have any ambition to support themselves, let alone their families, and their women know their letters home will eventually stop. While Mariana’s initially not thrilled to be stuck on the island, as the week progresses it seems as if she’ll never leave despite never fully fitting in or being accepted. Demanding for others to “speak Portuguese” to her doesn’t help. The islanders continually tell her she seems sad, alone, or lonely. She’s warned, “Not even the dead can rest here.” There’s the parallel character of Edite (Édith Scob), the other white, European woman in the village. She, too, came to the country following a man, a political prisoner who died, and she’s never left since. Despite speaking Kriolu and being better accepted than Mariana, she remains an outsider resigned to spend her days on Fogo, yet spending her income helping others leave.

Director and screenwriter, Pedro Costa was inspired to make CASA DE LAVA (1994) by Jacques Tourneur‘s I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943), and there are obvious similarities, even with one being a drama and the other a horror film. A nurse travels to an island country with a history of colonialism to care for a neurologically unresponsive patient. The greater community are the descendants of slaves. CASA DE LAVA’s (1994) equivalent to Sir Lancelot, whose Calypso Singer provides the Greek chorus aspect in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943), is Raul Andrade‘s Bassoé. He wanders the island playing mornas on his violin. He doesn’t sing anymore because he’s forgotten the words. Edite is Cape Verde’s Jessica Holland, except Edite is not initially catatonic. Edite became mesmerized by the island and attempted to acculturate herself. There’s a strange incident where she enters a fugue state after finding a dead dog on the beach.

French cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel didn’t meet Pedro Costa until two weeks before shooting, but they built an instant rapport. Costa is fluent in French, and both shared cultural references they could use to communicate with each other about scenes. Machuel’s cinematography emphasizes the expanse and severity of the dry, volcanic land. This was Costa’s first film shot in color. Clothing often provides the pop of color against the dark landscape and houses built of lava. Machuel frequently shoots actors in close-up. Those moments can feel intimate or invasive. No attempt is made to glamorize. Quite a few scenes incorporate shadows or surround characters with the darkness of night. The moodiness adds to the feelings of saudade.

The actors are a combination of professionals imported by Costa–Isaach De Bankolé, Inês de Medeiros, Édith Scob, and Pedro Hestnes (Edite’s son)–and local, non-actors. De Bankolé is a César Award-winning actor whom American audiences are likely to recognize from BLACK PANTHER (2018) or CASINO ROYALE (2006). At first Costa planned for Leão to remain in his coma for the entire film, but De Bankolé and Costa got into a physical fight over that plot point, and Costa changed his script! Inês de Medeiros won’t be as familiar to American audiences as her sister Maria de Medeiros, who starred in PULP FICTION (1994) and HENRY & JUNE (1990). Pedro Hestnes previously worked with Costa and Inês de Medeiros on O SANGUE / BLOOD (1989). Costa rehearsed both the professional and amateur actors, and he favored improvisation over the written script, even adding or deleting scenes.

The film gets its title from a letter Mariana steals in the film. Since she can’t read Kriolu, she has someone else read it to her. A man tells his lover everything he wishes he could give her, cigarettes, dresses, a car, a cheap bouquet, and a “casa de lava” a house made of lava. They’re the wishes of a man hoping his sacrifice of leaving his homeland can provide some security and comfort to the woman he left behind. While the moment feels romantic, and Mariana is a voyeuristic interloper in it, the reality is the other woman would have to live in the house without him. They would have only their letters for connection.

Pedro Costa ended up being a conduit for passing such letters on. When he was leaving Cape Verde after his film wrapped, the locals asked him to deliver letters or presents to their family members in Fontainhas, a shantytown in Lisbon. The experience changed his life and filmmaking. Much of his later films like JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA / COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006) and CAVALO DINHEIRO / HORSE MONEY (2014) concentrate on the Cape Verdean diaspora in Portugal, particularly in Fontainhas. Where once Mariana was the viewer’s and Costa’s entryway into Cape Verdean society, his newer features focus directly on his Cape Verdean characters with no stand-in or interloper necessary.

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