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.

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!

From the beginning, director Júlia Murat immerses us into this rural Brazilian village and its elderly inhabitants, and moves at their pace, which is to say, damn slowly (be forewarned). An old woman (Sonia Guedes) gets up early, makes bread, walks along the railway tracks to town, and provides them to an old man (Luis Serra) who runs a café, but not before having the same daily argument with him about who should arrange them in the display case. (Seriously, I think they showed that at least four times, which after the first two seemed a bit much). They pray in their rustic church with others, none of whom looks younger than 70, share lunch together, and occasionally mention some pretty dark things that have happened in their lives - children or other loved ones dying. It's more than a little touching to see the old woman writing a daily letter to her dead husband, full of tenderness, and to put fresh flowers outside the cemetery gate for him.

One day, a young woman (Lisa Fávero) shows up and asks to put up for a few nights. She appreciates the beauty of the quiet little town and its people, saying she was "born in the wrong time," despite some of them harboring the outmoded view that as a woman she shouldn't be drinking cachaça, the local spirits. She's also quite a photographer, and the scenes which show the artistic prints she creates with her cameras are wonderful, my favorites in the film. I also loved the moment when the old woman posed nude for her - there was such power in her smile, and a quiet defiance of time. This is a meditation on aging, community, and weathering life's hardships that has a lot going for it. I just wish it had given us a little bit more in its story (or backstories), or had moved along just a wee bit faster, even if its simplicity and pace were the whole point.

Only rarely I'm absolutely stunned by a movie, the last time it was the Iranian movie "woman without man" now it is this one. It is a movie that stays in your head for a long, long time. No, not much is happening making this movie unfit for the large public but as art movie it is one of the best I have ever seen. The movie is as calm as the life in the town, where the people "forgot to die". The appearance of photographer Rita only makes a subtle difference. I will not give a full description of the movie, others have done that very well for me, but without giving away the plot, the references to death, the cemetery and the ending of the movie make you wonder why Rita came to the town, without the movie making it clear, you just can wonder for yourself.

Amazing visual poetry

Just one small question kept me wondering: How did Rita fit all those different camera's, chemicals, papers, etc in that small rucksack of hers

"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.