Historias: Les histoires n'existent que lorsque l'on s'en souvient

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.

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!

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.

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

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.