PICTURES OF GHOSTS (B) - Brazil's Kleber Mendonca Filho ("Aquarius") takes a sentimental journey to his hometown of Recife to curate a fond nostalgia trip celebrating the origins of his love of film. He too often assumes that we'll be as wistful as he is when it comes to the movie houses of his youth.
Filho also spends the first third of this exercise wallowing in memories of his breakthrough feature "Neighboring Sounds," which he shot in his childhood home. It makes for a slow, unfocused start. (We bailed out of that meandering movie right before the halfway mark.) It isn't until he moves on to an archeological study of the seaside town's once-stately movie palaces that "Pictures of Ghosts" takes hold.
Through archival footage we meet a veteran of one of the projection booths, who has since died. Now, recent footage shows the projection booth stuffed with merchandise, including stacks and stacks of kitchen mixers in their original packaging. Filho finds footage of his young self sweeping the lobby of the cinema where he works.
Filho divides this into three parts, each introduced by a peppy classic song. Otherwise, his camera wanders, dreamlike. We catch snippets of Carnival celebrations, old clips of men performing capoeira. Filho narrates with a ethereal delivery. Now in his 50s, he reminisces about how Recife used to be known for its combination smell of "tide, fruit and piss." Everything here comes off as bittersweet and fleeting.
DAHOMEY (B) - Alice Diop offers up a somewhat pompous but heartfelt chronicle of the repatriation of 26 works of art pillaged by France and returned to the people of Benin. Too often she takes art into the realm of artificial, with stylistic flourishes that might strain too many viewers' patience.
On the positive side, this is barely an hour long. Diop's camera is still and reverent in multiple scenes of the art pieces being prepared for shipping and then getting unboxed. Perhaps she intends for that to come off as sterile and numbing. She holds her establishing shots a few beats longer than you'd expect. Overall, there's just something off about the timing.
It isn't until the second half that things pick up with an extended scene of mostly young people in Benin having a debate about what the return of the art means: Is this something to be celebrated? How should it be displayed -- in an elite urban museum or out among the people? Do the pieces even have any meaning to the current residents? It plays out like a more interesting version of Frederick Wiseman's process documentaries.
To get to that fascinating debate, you have to make it through the first half, and you must get acquainted with the gravelly voice meant to embody the central piece, a statue of a king, as if it were narrating its own journey back to its homeland. The gimmick never really works. The dialogue spills over into pretentiousness; at one point, toward the end, it intones, "Within me resonates infinity." Get me rewrite!
BONUS TRACKS
A sampling of songs from "Pictures of Ghosts," starting with Tom Ze's "Happy End" from 1972:
From 1977, macho Sidney Magal with "Meu Sangue Ferve por Voce":
Filho has fun with a cabdriver as they enjoy the sweet sounds of Herb Alpert's 1979 smooth-jazz hit "Rise":
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