LOST CHAPTERS – Review by Sarah Ward
What a gorgeous and insightful ode Lost Chapters is to the analogue and the tactile, and to physical reminders and repositories of the past. What a tribute writer/director/editor Lorena Alvarado’s debut feature is, too, to life’s small but significant moments and pleasures. Not just set and shot within but sharing its affection with Caracas as well, Lost Chapters ruminates upon Venezuela’s cultural history through its focus on the tangible items that fill our lives and tell our tales. Alvarado’s movie is also a bibliophile’s dream, plus a crafty mix of documentary and fiction that actively cherishes the objects and art, alongside the everyday interactions and encounters, that can easily be overlooked but are the ink in which our existence is written.
The fact that books are at Lost Chapters’ centre is both a fitting and a moving choice: in the internet age, what better represents humanity’s fading commitment to carving out material space for culture and history alike than the plight of the printed tome? As the film’s main characters Ena, Ignacio and Mamama are all aware — a daughter-father-grandmother trio played by Alvarado’s own family members Ena Alvarado, Ignacio Alvarado and Adela Rodríguez — there’s no shortage of novels and texts still in existence. Long vanished are the days, though, when literature’s treasures were society’s predominant source of knowledge and entertainment. For Ignacio, also consigned to time is his bookshop, a victim of his nation’s recent tumult. But he hasn’t given up, instead a lining a warehouse with the store’s unsold wares, regularly adding to its stocks via estate sales and gifts, and ultimately aiming to open a museum dedicated to Venezuelan books.
Odysseys can be enormous, tiny or anywhere in-between, their size wholly independent of their stature and impact. The quests at Lost Chapters’ heart might seem modest, then — finding novels, authors, poems — but they’re immense in feeling and meaning. Alvarado starts her narrative with twentysomething Ena’s return home from abroad, to visit her dad and Mamama and, initially, to revel in seeping into their ordinary routine. Then, amid the masses of publications always at hand, out slips a note mentioning a book as well as a writer that she’s unfamiliar with. Ignacio is already trying to track down every piece of Venezuelan literature that he can, including from fellow bookshops and at markets. Ena now has a task of her own in parallel with her father: turning detective, of sorts, in a search for a cultural mystery.
Alvarado also begins Lost Chapters with images of clouds and of Caracas, all being leafed through in print — visuals that are so perfectly photographed, both in the pages turned and by cinematographer José Ostos (a fellow feature first-timer), that they verge on painterly. The entirety of the film boasts this stunning precision. Before even introducing Ena, Ignacio and Mamama, let alone unfurling the minutiae of their days, Alvarado stresses a truth, then: that how we understand not just ourselves, but also our cities and countries, is tied to the artefacts chronicling everything that predates us. Make that two truths, actually, with the importance of genuinely seeing, appreciating and preserving such relics of bygone eras made just as plain. Lost Chapters continually lingers on details that reinforce these ideas, gazing lovingly at stacks and shelves of tomes, handwritten postcards and letters, photos immortalising generations, household trinkets and souvenirs, art gracing walls and public areas, eye-catching architecture and more.
A thoroughly rewarding documentary might simply catalogue this array of sights and, if directed, shot and edited as perceptively as Alvarado’s self-funded feature, ensure that its audience gleans why valuing every book, missive, snapshot, curio, creative work and the like is crucial to retaining a record of a society’s past, especially in a troubled present. Lost Chapters could’ve just been a film of items and objects — of things — and left a firm imprint. The docu-fiction hybrid is even more a movie of people, however. Assisted by the warmly naturalistic performances of both on-screen Alvarados alongside Rodríguez, it tenderly relishes how Ena, Ignacio and Mamama’s faces light up and moods shift in response to the physical custodians of our stories, and to each other.
The joy of a novel read in a sunny garden spot, a poem handed down through a family, a home with prized bric-a-brac displayed just so: Lost Chapters captures each. The delights of sharing the memories behind moments frozen in time, and of peering at a sculpture or mural en masse: it knows these, too. The sense of purpose and fulfilment that springs from seeking out the pieces of history that earn the film’s moniker, and of enshrining them for others, particularly when too few are taking up that job: Alvarado’s picture conveys that also. Although Ena has the novel Elvia and its potential scribe Daniel Rojas to hunt for, and Ignacio has Venezuelan texts in general to collect, Mamama’s part of the plot is no less vital. Due to dementia, being able to recall and cling to what she can from the past isn’t merely a given — and, with this and everything else within its frames, what an intelligent and layered movie Lost Chapters keeps proving.
