Critics reviews

Pinto's inventive, delicate, deeply moving What Now? Remind Me is part diary, part essay film and part survivor story. It's a movie rich with lucidity, beautifully honest and potent observations and a stunning fragility that makes us hyperaware of the brittleness of the human body and the resilience of the mind and soul.

The result might be blandly labeled a "personal diary," but such a signifier, as applied in today's cinema, makes little room for the boundless curiosity and intellect, not to mention elegant aesthetic control, exhibited across What Now?'s broad length.

What emerges is a multifaceted memoir, and a good reminder that essay can (and should) be a verb. Prescribed "a year of forced rest," Pinto—a longtime producer and sound designer best known for his work with João César Monteiro, Manoel De Oliveira, and Raul Rúiz—goes on a trip around his own world, fixing his attention on everything from a bee crawling along the edge of a hamburger to rain gathering on a windshield, as though they were new and unfamiliar sights begging to be explored.

Equally impressive is What Now? Remind Me, a sprawling account of one year in the life of Portuguese filmmaker Joaquim Pinto, as he continues his 20 year battle with HIV. While his body endures various stages of treatment, his mind flies freely through memories of the past and reflections of the world around him. Turning countless hours of footage into a lucid personal odyssey, this is filmmaking that's as powerful as life itself.

It's in these moments, when the film's mode of address is closer to that of a discourse or a sermon than an autobiographical confession, that What Now? Remind Me most reveals a "preoccupation with bearing witness." The substance of its testimony, as well as that ofThe New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John, is that plants, animals, and natural phenomena have something to tell us—a message to reveal, a Word to make incarnate, an inheritance to bestow—that can only be heard by careful listening and re-listening, which is to say, recording.

Joaquim Pinto's What Now? Remind Me opens on a rapturous image of a slug slowly — slooowly — making its way across a rough patch of twigs. The shot primes you for the rest of the movie. It slows down your heartbeat, attunes you to tiny changes within the frame, and prepares you for the drama of nature. By the time some nondescript shadows start to dance over the slug, it's as if an army has invaded.

Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, "What Now? Remind Me" is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence... Sensual and serious, intimate and ineluctable, "What Now?" may take almost three hours to unspool, but you'll barely notice. Whether watching a virus replicate under a microscope or a dragonfly wobble interminably on a blade of grass, this meditation on mortality conveys more than anything the joy of being alive.

The most tragic aspect of What Now? is how, by the end, Pinto appears more resigned than when the film began: The doc starts as a mix of memoir, diary, and documentary, but by the end it has the distinct feeling of a last will and testimony.

Throughout [Pinto] favors hard cuts between disparate sequences in the film's Boyhood-length running time, plus the odd psychologically motivated superimposition, and layers in a bountiful soundtrack of classical music with some key anthemic pop. Through to its fugue-like ending, it's Pinto's delirious vigil for himself, a confession of bodily and mental weakness that becomes a declaration of spiritual and philosophical resilience.

it's a virtually undefinable work whose origins are rooted only in the maker's soul... The film's style is symbolic as it relates to Pinto's medical care; just as his treatment is empirical in nature, so, too, is the effusive manner in which he assembles the pseudo-narrative. The film's unresolved ending is a perfect metaphor for the conclusiveness of Pinto's aspirations.

Documentary and personal essay are inadequate labels for this profound autobiographical opus by Portuguese filmmaker Joaquim Pinto; like Chris Marker'sSans Soleil (1983) or Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's Soft and Hard (1985), the film uses self-inquiry to divine what it means to be alive at this point in history... The artful compositions and dense sound design are ravishingly sensual, balancing out the narration's intellectual rigor.

What Now? Remind Me, which is narrated by Pinto, rails against the inadequacies of modern healthcare systems while surprising with flashes of brilliant color and music, hinting that Joaquim and Nuno's troubles are enlarging their spirits.