Found Memories

One thing I like about subtitled films that I can ffwd during slow parts and then slow down to real time to read dialog. This movie needed a push for many of its scenes: watching a septuagenarian pick their way down a train track is already going to be tedious, but this is a film of repetitious lives, so we get to see it again and again. YES FILM I GET IT: their lives are rote and simple, and I do appreciate that each time we see a repeated event, it is at least framed differently. LOVELY moments do occur, beginning with the opening shot. But watching Madalena sorting through Rita's photos gets tedious pretty fast, and the many repeated scenes are just as repetitious for us as they are for the characters. Add in Rita's completely unexplained appearance (and fairly quick acceptance) and -- well, we can see where the filmmaker just wanted to make a certain kind of film, and so did. Not the best of its kind, but beautiful to look at. And that's something worthwhile.

In the past I seldom got excited about watching a film with an entire cast of ageing actors - until I came upon "Found Memories". With the exception of one young actress, playing a visiting photograph from a big city, the film consists of all old folks, many in frail health.

Life in this small village is repetitive, slow and mundane. And yet life goes on. Many of the ageing inhabitants have outlived their children, and past memories helped to fuel their will to live. The arrival of a young girl, a photographer, added a little bit of change to their otherwise uneventful lives. You sense the generation gap, and the gap between the past and the modern. But in the end this does not matter.

I could not help but care about some of the characters, and thought about them after the film is finished. Needless to say, I like this film a lot, and will be training my eyes on any future work by this brilliant Brazilian director Julia Murat.

"Found Memories" is not for everyone; it is for a very sensitive audience and for those who are artistically open to an interpretation of moments on screen which embody years of life of others. Other reviewers are right by writing that you cannot expect everyone to internalize such an emotional experience created with few words. The way it represents other human life in a place far away and removed from our lives appeals as a beautiful and very moving story we do not usually touch or approach every day.

This particular script did it with a sparsity of words and an amplification of gorgeous visuals. The beauty of the images that came with it, whether shown through photographs or through the movie itself, come together like a fantastic reproduction of the concert that is life. It resonates with me long after the movie is over.

I applaud the screenwriters, the director and the brilliant actors.

This film is a beautifully photographed fable about a ghost village where no one has died since 1976, and where old people are stuck in their memories - until the arrival of a young female photographer changes things. It is also a melancholy ode to the heydays of the coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, once the symbol of Brazil, and a flourishing region that prospered thanks to its coffee plantations, but now a derelict region full of empty estates and ghost towns. This wonderfully touching and melancholic story is beautifully shot, sweet and sour, honest and heart-warming. It shows Brazil as a country with many realities, and reflects one of these realities, one that often remains untold. The film is very well acted, slow at some points, but it definitely stays with you after it ends. It is also a fantastic reflection on the passage of time, a poetic, humble film about the last people left in this small village, people full of hidden memories and set in their ways. As the worlds of the young and old intertwine, the dichotomies between resistance and understanding, and between labor and art begin to fade (like the old photographs hanging on Madalena's walls). Through a growing relationship, each teaches the other about life and about the importance of not letting it slip away. A real gem!

My monthly FilmMovement selection arrived today, I put it in the player, and I was blown away. The American title is "Found Memories", which seemed quite appropriate for this mesmerizing film.

It brought back memories of afternoons in the darkroom, playing with high and low contrast paper and double exposures, the weird smell of the photography chemicals in my nostrils, and the low red light. It brought back memories of sitting very quietly behind a door when I was supposed to be in bed, listening to my grandparents tell stories about their youth. It brought back memories of going through boxes of old snapshots found in my grandparents' attic, occasionally stopping to ask "Gramma, what's this?"

Old and new gadgets exist side by side in the film without comment. One camera is a Digital SLR, but the others are pinhole cameras of various construction. Once, the exposure of one of the pinhole cameras is timed with a smart-phone. Recorded music comes from both an old un-amplified gramophone and a pocket digital player with ear-buds and no moving parts.

If there's a constant running through the cinematography, it's abstract patterns and textures: the combination of rust and dust on a decaying mirror, stains and rust on an old bathtub, worn paint, greenery growing through railroad track ballast, ancient clothing with faded printed patterns, heavily weathered wrought iron, abandoned railroad sleeper cars with their regular windows, unexpected angles of light, and paint peeling away to reveal all the different colors the car once was, handmade pottery, an egg being cracked open, a tracery of cracks on an old concrete wall, and on and on. The variations in color are amazing. When there's a wooden kitchen work surface with pottery bowls -some raw and some painted- and baskets and old metal cannisters filled with rough flour and fresh eggs making bread dough, in a faded and stained kitchen that's almost open to the elements, all illuminated by a kerosene lantern, everything is some shade of brown. There must be several hundred different shades of brown, and the film captures them all; point to any area of the screen and try to find that exact color shade again somewhere else, and you can't. Silence and darkness are foregrounded here too, mostly indirectly but once or twice explicitly; six lines of dialog often fills a minute or two of screen time. It was like being in a master photography class, with every scene of the film being one of the example photos.

Often cinematographers have a strong suit: landscapes, or architecture, or people, or... But here everything gets the same exquisite treatment. Just a simple old building, with three openings and a bench outside, the openings painted green and the the walls painted mostly yellow, with a reddish stripe and a brownish stripe, fully occupied the frame and my attention. The lingering, loving, almost caressing closeups of ancient crinkled faces are astounding.

Since the dictum to "hold still" isn't taken very seriously, the results from the pinhole cameras are prints that are sometimes ghostly and often beautiful in unexpected ways. We see those prints being developed and dried, and eventually rummaged through by some of the characters. One would expect those prints to be throw-away props, mocked up to be just good enough to forward the narrative. In fact they're much more. I've seen photographs in museum shows that weren't as good as those prints.

I don't know if the director Julie Murat or the cinematographer Lucio Bonelli should get the main credit here; I suspect though it's the combination, with the whole being more than the sum of the parts.

The premise and narrative are simple -even slight- sort of "Groundhog Day" meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez, something you'd expect to find in a sci-fi treatment rather than a nostalgia treatment. There's not much profound philosophy here. (And I suspect being "old" myself made it easier for me to tune in to the film's wavelength.) If it was just about "getting the point across", it could easily have been done in only thirty minutes. But it's something else, something I can only sorta describe as "visual poetry".