Critics reviews

Many filmmakers adapt books, but relatively few make movies that actually feel like books—that is, they achieve the sort of patience and interiority that come with reading. Judging from their second feature, Araby (which screens this week at the Film Center), Brazilian writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa belong to this select group.

Presenting popular songs as collective memory and union organization as a toehold on hope, the filmmakers dramatize, thinly but ardently, the rise of self-consciousness, of a revolution in the soul that hints at political action.

It has memorable, even quirky characters (such as Cristiano’s friend, Luizinho, who bums off on the job and hates arugula), and a strong, at times almost monumentally epic composition. More importantly, it has a distinct pulse, a mix of quicker vernacular with loftier phrasing, punctuated by a varied musical score—an enjambment of rock and Brazil’s popular tunes, traversing registers, high and low.

Araby, a film that spends much of its runtime expressing the busy inner life of an outwardly placid man, is dedicated to the principle that appearances can be deceiving, a truism borne out in surprising ways by the movie itself, a skin-shedding thing that defies easy taxonomy.

In a climactic epiphany, the noises of a hot, grinding factory fall away, and in a deathlike silence Cristiano recognizes the emptiness of the worker’s lives, the extent to which they have been reduced to machinery, and concluding with heartbreaking simplicity: “I want to go home. I wish everyone would go home.”

The directors have a refined style — the shooting and editing tell of a sensibility informed by Robert Bresson, the Dardenne brothers and Cristian Mungiu — but it doesn’t always fully pay off. . . . And yet, thanks to Mr. de Sousa’s superb performance, the movie often convincingly portrays not just the exploited condition of laborers such as Cristiano, but the nagging sadness of life itself.

For all of its flouting of mainstream style and storytelling, it’s basically an academic artwork that begs to be graded and read (or at least read about) more than watched. For regulars of that particular movie demimonde, the reference points are obvious and limited, from the rigorous shot compositions of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to the impoverished dreamworlds of Pedro Costa.

If, 15 minutes into Araby, you aren’t persuaded that you’re going to see anything remarkable, bide your time: the film seems deliberately to start in an unspectacular register, by way of a slow-burning setup. The measure of the film’s audacity is that it seems to start so very unaudaciously.

In the film’s climactic sequence, Cristiano wanders through the man-made molten landscape of the Ouro Preto foundry, pouring out his exhausted body and soul in an inner monologue that harmonizes the film’s melodies of class-consciousness and forgotten-man melancholy.

In this journey from individualism to a collectivity, and from subjectivity to a personal sensitivity shaped by class, Araby takes charge of the dominant, normative structure of storytelling, and puts a mirror in front of it, cleverly seducing the viewer to enter a world that they wouldn't otherwise.

There's a conversation between our wayward hero and an older man at a loading dock about the various difficulties or ease in carrying different things that turns into a back-and-forth list— concrete (heavier than it seems), coffee (smells great)—that is just perfect . . . Other moments are less poignant, with a limpidity that goes beyond the surprisingly casual and seems superfluous; a necessary casualty to the style, perhaps.

Though Cristiano is archetypically situated in a long line of weary loners who've wandered cinema's backroads and bywaters, his is less a voyage of becoming than an eternal return, which makes Araby a synthesis of seemingly contradictory terms: an epic of unsensational proportions.