“Lost Chapters” Weaves Literary Mysteries Into Family Bonds

Sometimes profound originality sneaks up quietly and modestly. The first feature by the Venezuelan director Lorena Alvarado, “Lost Chapters,” was made mainly with a crew of two (her and the cinematographer José Ostos), and the three main characters are played by family members: her sister, Ena Alvarado; her father, Ignacio Alvarado; and her grandmother Adela Rodríguez, who is Ignacio’s mother. The characters’ relationships are their real-life ones, as are their first names, but the story is fiction. The action takes place in Caracas, where Ignacio and his mother live together in a comfortable, modern house. It’s August, and Ena, who is twenty-five, has come to visit her father and grandmother. Ignacio is a book dealer who recently had to close his shop—he darkly mentions conditions in the country that forced his hand—and Ena helps out at the warehouse where he keeps his vast collection of books. While shelving old volumes, she finds a handwritten postcard mentioning an obscure novel from 1912, by someone she hasn’t heard of, which, the card hints, may have been written pseudonymously by the real-life Venezuelan author Rafael Bolívar Coronado. She embarks on a search for the book and on research about Bolívar Coronado, who was known for writing under pseudonyms, even compiling anthologies of works by nonexistent poets, all written by him. She forms a plan to write a novel about Bolívar Coronado, based in history but imaginatively counterfactual.

That’s more or less the story of the movie. There isn’t a single supernatural or imaginary event, yet it’s more alive, scene to scene, than the blockbuster of the moment; despite its doubtless infinitesimal budget, just about any image in it displays more immediate observation and spontaneous creation than any of the script illustrations put gigantically onscreen in “The Odyssey.” It’s a movie of the image, in which Alvarado perceives a quasi-mystical dimension of ordinary things and serenely fills the screen with a sense of bittersweet wonder.

That visual power dawns from the many discoveries that await Ena upon her homecoming. She finds that her grandmother, whom she calls Mamama, is beginning to lose her memory and that Ignacio anticipates placing her in a care facility soon. On one occasion, at the warehouse, Adela remembers her youthful taste for Charles Dickens, but, on another, she forgets that Ena’s father is her son. Meanwhile, Ignacio, since the closure of his store, has launched a personal passion project, the founding of the Museum of Venezuelan Books (which actually exists, founded by Ignacio Alvarado). His daily activities are complicated by a donation of a five-thousand-volume book collection that’s more a headache than a bounty.

With a story such as this one, in which the accretion of slight incidents builds to a shape suggesting a small but crucial segment of the arc of life, the demands on a filmmaker are weighty. The script doesn’t do the bulk of the work, and the actors can’t do it, because the material doesn’t admit of interpretive extremes. Instead, the simplicity of the action requires a kind of cinematic exaltation, an aesthetic of daily life that enshrines an approach to filmmaking and to the life that is depicted. From the start, Alvarado’s direction emphasizes the grandeur built into the family’s routine passions by simple choices of great artistic authority: her wide-screen images, done mostly in fixed frames, are poised and assertive, and when the camera moves it does so slowly and smoothly, with pensive grace.

The home in Caracas to which Ena returns, for all the bright clarity of its rooms and the lush foliage of its grounds, is filled with ambient emotion, which crackles like an electrical charge. What generates the charge are the objects the place contains. Alvarado’s fervent attentiveness to spaces and their contents daringly places them on nearly equal dramatic footing with the characters who inhabit and use them. She catches objects in motion: books flopping on a shelf imply others that have been moved; Adela’s rocking chair, empty but seesawing, indicates that she’s just got up. Branches blow in the breeze, rain drips from eaves; a treehouse outside and a doll house indoors seemingly conjure the voices of children who played there. Alvarado’s achievement is nearly animistic, turning objects from icons of life into living things themselves, infused with the being of those who live with them and care for them.

Among the most potent detonators of feeling are family photos, which Ena and Mamama peruse together and which Alvarado films with an original and obstinate eye for detail and fragmentation, capturing, in extreme closeups, the totemic intimacy that these pictures conjure for family members. The usual domestic collection of tchotchkes—a wall-rack menagerie of figurines that Mamama tends, religious statuettes on a stereo—gain extra poignancy from what Ena calls the house’s hidden disorder, the chaos within cabinets, closets, and drawers. The upside to that chaos is that it’s an accidental archive. Ena finds a long-ago letter to the Tooth Fairy, which she reads aloud to her grandmother. Another letter, a confessional and self-flagellating note from one of Ignacio’s brothers, is painful both in itself and because its discovery exposes the extent of Mamama’s memory loss.

The objects come to life through their connection to the drama that unfolds around them; the most vital and powerful objects are books themselves, including the phantom 1912 volume that’s the movie’s McGuffin. Alvarado loves the look of books and of text, often filling the frame with pages that characters are reading. (It’s a pet peeve of mine that most movies in which characters are seen reading show nothing of what they’re reading.) When Ena visits the library to delve into Bolívar Coronado’s story, the camera lingers on photos of the writer and other literary figures; it shows what’s in the archived newspapers that Ena flips through and what’s on the microfilm she consults. Ena keeps a journal throughout, and it punctuates the movie by way of extreme closeups of key words in her own handwriting. The dialogue in the film is relaxed and concise, expressive in content and calm in tone, but its literary substance is dominant, whether in talk of Bolívar Coronado’s unusual career or in Ena’s recollection of a poem that her grandmother used to recite—and which the young woman exerts herself to find, learn, and restore to Mamama.

Much of the action involves father and daughter tightening their bond as they zip through the city on his scooter, visiting the city’s booksellers—not just stores but also tented outdoor stalls—in search of the elusive 1912 tome and visiting some of the city’s sights. In these sequences, as in walks through parks and Ena’s library visits, “Lost Chapters” creates a kind of urban chamber music, with intimate moments among small groups expressing intense pictorial fervor. Yet there’s a principle that Alvarado follows throughout, making sure that the active and exploratory father and daughter don’t overshadow Mamama. There’s a sort of equality in Alvarado’s editing, whereby, in most sequences, she takes care to show what all three of the family members are doing, along with the spaces and the objects they see. (There’s also the occasional sly wink at the dull ambience of political misrule, as when TV news about a coming storm is delivered by a colonel who runs the meteorology office.)

In “Lost Chapters,” bright, airy images and dialogue of graceful candor animate dramas of inchoate ambition’s ardent awakening, of the quiet joy of reunions, of the bittersweet loam of family memory, and also capture the sociable, professional churn of the city. Alvarado’s unadorned lyricism subtly packs vast implications. Few movies prove with such decisive simplicity and clarity the nature of movie aesthetics, offer such proof in action of the defining qualities of the art—not showing and telling but listening, looking, and discovering. ♦