A great film arrives: João Dumans and Affonso Uchôa's quietly magnificent ARABY

"Stick with it, please." I've said this before, but I don't think it has ever been more necessary or appropriate than with ARABY, the new movie from the writing/directing duo of João Dumans and Affonso Uchôa: If you stay with this quiet little film -- despite its leisurely pacing, refusal to overly dramatize, and a protagonist who suddenly shifts from the expected one to an entirely different person -- by the time you reach the conclusion of this 98-minute movie, you will have experienced labor, the workplace, love, life, death and maybe as close to the whole of humanity as any single movie is able to provide.

Filmmakers Dumans (above, right) and  Uchôa (above, left) build their small monument to the life of 90 per cent from this statement uttered by their protagonist early on: "In the end, all we have is what we remember." From this, they have crafted a tale that concentrates on but one man (Aristides de Sousa, shown below) yet takes in much of our world, building via an aggregate of detail to a conclusion that, though in no way surprising, still suddenly seems to expand into enormous compassion and understanding.

How in hell did the filmmakers manage this feat? As best TrustMovies can tell, it comes via a kind of visual and verbal poetry that, like all else here, goes nearly unnoticed -- until it suddenly begins resonating like crazy. (I may simply be slow; all this might resonate a lot earlier with you.) Maybe it has to do with that trickly transfer of feeling for a single human being into an understanding of humanity itself.

This is a Brazilian film, after all. I've long thought that Brazil seems to treat its people about as cavalierly, if not in downright uncaring fashion, as any supposedly "democratic" South American country. We see this in a government that spends oodles to host the Olympic Games only to put its populace in ever more dire straits. And via films from Elite Squad and its follow-up (that bang you atop the head with violence against the people) to the quieter, probing films of Kleber Mendonça, the great preponderance of humanity is alway given the shaft.

In Araby, this is true all over again, and yet via its protagonist and the people he meets along his journey of laboring-just-to-survive, we enter the world of the masses in a manner subtly different from other films. Here, it's via a kind of memoir our hero has composed (when we at last learn why and where he began this memoir, it becomes ever more meaningful and humane) that tells his story as best he is able.

The lovely, heartbreaking irony here comes from the fact that our hero, Cristiano, feels that he cannot communicate or express himself very well. Yet the filmmakers provide him voice and view so that he is able to give us everything we need to understand the love he feels, the loneliness he experiences and his constant need to not simply survive but to communicate.

I would think that there must be millions of workers in China and India -- hell, even some Trump acolytes here in the USA -- who could identify with and understand this movie.  There are no "labels" attached to any view here, and yet Dumans and Uchôa offer up enormous political commentary. By the time the film has come full circle, its impact has burgeoned into such collective power and momentum that, days after I've viewed it, I am still reliving and thinking about this movie.

From Grasshopper Film, in Portuguese with English subtitles, Araby opens this Friday in New York City at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and then will hit another four cities on either coast, with -- one hopes -- even more cities to follow over the weeks to come. Click here and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Where to Watch to view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters. 

Agnès Varda's back, with JR in tow and maybe her most delightful doc yet: FACES PLACES

She is not only one of France's most sublime national treasures, but that of cinema, too, and her worth simply grows from film to film. Agnès Varda's latest -- and perhaps her last (she turns 90 next May, and both her general strength and eyesight seem to be slowly failing) -- turns out to be a lovely collaboration with a photographer and muralist who goes by the name of JR. (His moniker is not a nod to Dallas, I am guessing).

The collaboration turns out to be a near-perfect one, with the pair complementing and setting each other off in the most wonderful of ways. He (shown at left) is tall; she's short. She (shown below) is old; he's young. He is hugely private, never removing his dark glasses, while she could hardly be more transparent. And they're both so full of talent and creative juice that spending 90 minutes with them will seem as though you've died and gone directly to art/cinema/ photography/mural

heaven. Not to mention all the lovely people and animals you'll meet along the way. I don't think you will even need to have viewed other Varda pix to fully appreciate this one, for it bubbles along with such life, energy and good will that it rather dares you not to immediately fall in love with it, its creators and all the folk you meet within. (If you're new to Varda, I would suggest Cleo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I for starters.) The more you've already seen of her films, however, the more you will understand and appreciate why this one seems maybe the culmination of all she has accomplished.

How does she do it, one wonders? By "it," I mean the ease by which she manages to connect all these people and the "art" they contribute here by simply allowing themselves to be filmed and photographed -- JR's amazing enlargements of the photos then being glued to their local buildings -- as well as by speaking with the filmmakers and sharing bits of their lives. All this coalesces into something simple and very pleasurable yet also somehow rich and profoundly humane.

As one of the interviewees mentions en route, "Art is supposed to surprise us, right?" Absolutely. Hence the surprise and delight we take in meeting everyone from the woman, above, who refuses to move out of her "condemned" row of old houses formerly occupied by French miners (she was a miner's wife)

to the flock of goats we meet, along with the folk who raise them. Some goats no longer have horns; the how and why of this is explored quite interestingly, with no judgment made but nonetheless giving us the information we need to make our own.

Then there are the wives of the dockworkers whom we meet and get to know just a bit, before their images (at left) are attached to the huge containers that the workers must fill and empty. We go from towns to countryside to the Louvre (through which JR pushes Varda in her wheelchair, as an homage to Godard's running-through-the-Louvre scene in Bande à part.

She still rather worships Godard (foolishly, in my estimation, for she is twice the filmmaker that this over-rated, misogynistic pretension-artist usually is). Varda and JR go to Godard's "new house" for breakfast, and his response should not surprise anyone who follows the man's films.

Among some genuinely precious moments here are a look at a town's "bell ringer," the worker in a salt factory who tries to keep the place "accident-free," and the dear old (and now deceased) friend of Varda, Guy Bourdin, whom we see as a young man who was Varda's model. How Bourdin's youth becomes very briefly immortalized, below, is wonderful, strange and sad.

The final gift that these filmmakers offer each other at film's end is so take-your-breath-away perfect that Faces Places (Visages, villages in the original French) immediately becomes a movie that, like all of Varda's work, you'll want and need to view again.

From Cohen Media Group and running just 90 minutes, opens theatrically this Friday, October 6, in New York City at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and on October 13 in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Playhouse 7 and Royal theaters. Elsewhere. Yes, nationwide, in limited release, but I have not found a link to the list of theaters, as yet....