Pedro Costa’s last film, Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse
Money, 2014], continues the work with Ventura
in a way that could be seen to overtake Vanda’s
role in his series of films since Ossos [Bones,
1997]. In Juventude em Marcha [Colossal Youth,
2006], by means of «the power of the false»
(Deleuze), Ventura is a stratigraphic character,
the result of a confrontation between fictional
and documentary powers which permanently
shifts, in Ventura himself, the actually existing
Ventura from the invented Ventura. This builds
a portrait that, with the ritornello of the film —
Ventura’s insistent recitation of a love letter —,
moves across centuries of Portugal and world’s
history. But in Horse Money, both concentration
and fragmentation increase. There are all kind of
coincidences and clashes between the past and
the present time, which are presented in a glossolalia,
voices that spread memory everywhere,
as in the final sequence in the elevator, when we
have Ventura and a soldier of the 25 April Revolution
completely mummified, transformed into
a golden statue. In this paper, I highlight the everlasting
present created through the length of
time and the scarcity of space. This is not a time
that corresponds to confusion or delirium; this
is the time built by the film, and I will particularly
focus my paper on this coincident mental and
historical landscape that, by entailing the body
and the life of a person transformed into a character,
allows to the filmmaker to ride through
history with Ventura’s horse Money.
