‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Review: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Wry, Wistful Doc Ponders What We Lose When Our Picture Palaces Go Dark
“I love downtown Recife,” narrates Kleber Mendonça Filho over self-shot footage of his hometown’s dilapidated center, its once-promising clusters of midcentury high-rises now graying and under-occupied. He admits that he considered cutting that line from his voiceover, deeming it redundant, before letting it stand: “You should say when you like someone.” In “Pictures of Ghosts,” a stirring, idiosyncratic ode to the city — and cinemas — that raised him, the Brazilian filmmaker duly wears his heart on his sleeve, raking through the domestic and public spaces that made him the artist he is today, and making his affection and gratitude for them known. In so doing, he remembers the larger communities sustained and abandoned by an evolving national cinema culture, making for a documentary that feels acutely, even eccentrically, personal, but never navel-gazing.
You can see why Mendonça Filho might have felt he didn’t need to restate his feelings for Brazil’s fourth-largest city: His first two features, 2013’s “Neighboring Sounds” and 2016’s “Aquarius,” also functioned as complex valentines to Recife, a place somehow in a simultaneous, symbiotic state of progress and decay, both overrun by noisily echoing urban activity and haunted by absence where one way of life has made way for another. Though it crosses into nonfiction, “Pictures of Ghosts” feels thoroughly of a piece with those films: When it doesn’t explicitly reference and sample them, it shares their air of cockeyed melancholy and nosy human interest. The director’s own droll first-person perspective, meanwhile, is an asset to a film that should rack up festival appointments following its out-of-competition Cannes premiere. Indie distributors sympathetic to Mendonça Filho’s nostalgia for old-school theatrical exhibition should pay attention.
More from Variety
Loosely conversational in tone, the film is divided into three chapters that nonetheless bleed into each other thematically. The first, “The Setubal Apartment,” explores the roomy modernist apartment in which the filmmaker grew up, a stone’s throw from the beach in an ever-gentrifying neighborhood. The director’s acolytes may recognize as it as a location in more than one of his previous films — he’d occasionally lie about the degree of production design in his work, he quips — and Mendonça Filho’s present-day inhabitation of the space echoes those films’ social fixations. Mixing vintage home video with his own filming, he suggests how shifting interior decor reflects interior life (his intensifying cinephilia marked by posters on the walls, encroaching on space once dictated by his mother, a historian), and peers over walls to check in on neighboring homes that have atrophied or moved on.
In part two, “Cinemas of Downtown Recife,” he ventures out to explore the theaters that once fed his obsession but have mostly shuttered, thwarted by diminished footfall in the run-down CBD, and competition from suburban multiplexes with advanced aircon. Archival photos and newsreels recall a golden era of Recife glamor, when stars like Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis could be lured there for a premiere, while Mendonça Filho’s own scrapbook of materials captures his cinematic education in a gradually waning age of interest and expertise, as the then-aspiring filmmaker formed friendships with veteran projectionists who would not be succeeded.
One such palace, the riverside-set Cinema São Luiz, endures as an independent arthouse and repertory cinema; others the filmmaker visits as mere shells, abandoned and unoccupied. In the film’s third part, “Churches and Holy Ghosts,” he probes the alternative future for these halls, visiting those that have been repurposed into Evangelical churches, reflective of shifting religious trends in modern-day Brazil. Noting that cinemas “can be places of kindness,” Mendonça Filho takes limited comfort in this change; it plainly delights him more that the São Luiz — originally built on the site of a church, with telling Catholic imagery in its architectural detailing — continues to reverse that pattern.
In a drily whimsical closing sketch, Mendonça Filho converses with a taxi driver who’s delighted to learn he has an artist in his cab, immediately asking the filmmaker if he’s ever made a telenovela. The director laughs it off: His film isn’t sentimentally naive about the future of filmgoing, wryly recognizing that his treasured notion of communal cinephilia will eventually go the way of the ghosts. While he’s alive, however, he will seek solace in the screens available to him.
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
