Found Memories

"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.

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.

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.

It's hard to find distinct words to describe this film so lacking in distinction. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but neither is there anything particularly profound or even aesthetically stark about it. Recently acquired by 'FILM MOVEMENT' in North America, I suppose Murat's HISTORIAS could be best summed up as a 'FILM MOVEMENT' sort of film. 'FILM MOVEMENT' characteristically tends to sell bland international films through its monthly subscription service that might otherwise struggle beyond the festival circuit. HISTORIAS is unfortunately such a film. It is the sort of slow moving, under-written, and blankly directed--but technically functional--film common to the world sidebars of film festivals desperate to pander to marginalized filmmakers, but that will most likely go unnoticed in the real world. The synopsis above is pretty succinct and complete--and that's really all you get. In a rural village in Brazil where the old folks no longer die and the village cemetery has been locked, a young female photographer happens upon them to challenge their tradition of immortality. If the parable seems generic it's because it is. Think Borges-lite, but in place of philosophical complexity and poetic subtly you instead get some armchair existentialism about living and dying and rather ham-fisted poetry and sophomoric metaphors. The use of the photographer character (come to show the geriatrics their world with a NEW EYE...get it?) as a story device is the sort of contrived symbology at work here. You get all the clichéd shots and scenarios you'd expect given the topic (camera chasing girl down corridors of the village's abandoned train...because they're STRANDED in time...get it?, or girl dancing for an entire scene to Franz Ferdinand on her ipod, because she's the YOUNG and vibrant contradiction to the immortals...get it?, etc.). The same conceit is underscored again and again until the film's makers exhaust it (and the audience) and stall at the expected climax to put the oldie immortals (and the film) out of their misery. There just aren't any 'ecstatic truths' in it, as Herzog would say, nor are there any real SCENES or points of interest, just the same juvenile ponderance (i.e. "What if we didn't die?") being cartoonishly and artlessly illustrated over and over without any culminating revelation. It's a rather formulaic and cliché abstraction that you can almost SEE being written in whatever screen writing workshop it was almost certainly born in. The direction is as clumsy and amateurish: the presence of the guiding voice just behind the camera is distractingly evident in most scenes (indeed many of the actors' performances seem like on-camera rehearsals) and the anchored-camera mise- en-scene often has the charmless arrangement common to TV production. There is some nice cinematography of the organically ornate Brazilian landscape and the old locals used (exploited?) for the story are compelling, but they make the film only accidentally interesting. The filmmakers may have made better use of both had they forgone their vain efforts of forcing a trite story upon the place and its people and simply made a sincere documentary instead of a forced narrative. As is, HISTORIAS wastes its very real village and its very real villagers for a story that is not worthy of them. Worth seeing if you want a few peripheral postcard peeks at life in the Brazilian countryside, otherwise not worth the 100 minutes it asks you to trade for it.

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.