In short: Where Are You, João Gilberto (2018)

Documentary filmmaker Georges Gachot follows the traces of German writer Marc Fischer’s book “Hobalala” in an attempt to finish what Fischer started: find and hopefully meet the great Brazilian musician João Gilberto. For the last decades of his life, Gilberto spent an eccentric and reclusive life, apparently living in hotel rooms and avoiding personal contact with anyone as much as possible, for unknown reasons.

On the trail of Fischer on the trail of Gilberto, Gachot meets various other key figures of Brazilian music history, encounters saudade as well as more European coded versions of sadness, loneliness and nostalgia, and ends up in front of a closed hotel room door listening to Gilberto singing behind it.

Obviously, this is quite different from your typical music documentary, particularly since Gachot often seems to go out of his way to avoid naming, dating or categorizing – if you want to learn about Brazilian music history, you’re wrong here. Instead, this is a film all about the feelings Gilberto’s music evokes in Gachot, Fischer and others, the feelings Fischer evoked writing about the absence of Gilberto as an actual person to be communicated with, as well as the sad beauty of music, not of its historical context.

This approach stands the film in good stead, as does Gachot’s ability to relate to everyone he interviews on a personal and specific level that feels grounded in a genuine appreciation for people with their foibles and eccentricities, as much as a love for Gilberto’s work and Fischer’s book.

That Gachot is also clearly one of those “poetic truth” documentarians makes me a little sceptical about the factual truthfulness of the hotel room door ending, but it’s so perfect an emotional capstone (even more so when you keep in mind that Gilberto himself would die in 2019, never making the big stage comeback and the albums produced by sensitive young fans he so richly deserved), factual truthfulness isn’t the point.