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.

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.

This Brazilian film has some amazing cinematography, including several scenes seemingly lit only by lantern that are truly unique and impressive. I don't know how the DP pulled it off, but I'd like to know! It's about a small, dying community in rural Brazil where only the old-timers remain, due to death or diaspora. The setting seems from another century until a very modern city girl, infatuated with photography, arrives. Like other recent Brazilian films I've seen, this flirts with the language of magical-realism without resorting to it in any absolute way. However you interpret the narrative, the film implies that one's memories are only meaningful if one has someone else to subjectively interpret them- if one can become a story-teller. Indeed, time can only proceed if there is an other to testify to what has transpired, to what has been lost to time. Implicitly, then, life, being-in-the-world, is impossible without death or, as Derrida would say, unless there is an other to sift through the inheritance one leaves behind.

"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.

I don't usually write film reviews but am doing so for Found Memories because the critical reviews and several user reviews seem to entirely miss the point, complaining that there is no plot, it's too slow, an anachronism etc. Some users commented on the ghostly beauty of the photographs taken by the young woman Rita and at least one person commented on the relationship that develops between Madalena and Rita. I think this film is brilliantly insightful about love, community, life and death. The pace of the film reminds us of how much we have lost in the fast paced modern world. Rita says she was born in the wrong time and doesn't have a sense of belonging anywhere. Madalena and Antonio,the town's baker and coffee brewer, have a quirky friendship. As the film unfolds, we learn that these two have both survived their children. The community has no young people and they fear death will completely eradicate the village. Rita brings hope and eventually the villagers warm to her as she begins making photos of people rather than just old artifacts and learns how to make bread with Rita. If you watch this film with your heart, not just with your eyes, you might discover how breathtaking and heartbreaking it really is, much like our lives.