Reviewed By Simon Zhou

I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You
Dir. Marcelo Gomes, Karim Ainouz

It takes some getting used to at first, the unavoidably grainy images procured haphazardly on Super 8 and DV, the sometimes interminably long takes in which the presence of the camera is intentionally unavoidable – the unseen presence of the main character at any point in the film although the narrative is transported by his incessant voice-over.  But to partake in I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You, a road-movie that is a collaboration between directors Marcelo Gomes and Karim Ainouz, is to lie in the back seat of a beat-up sedan, feet dangling out the window as you make your way across the Sertao scrubland of northeastern Brazil.

Unlike any movie that I have seen, I Travel Because I Have To… is a travelogue confessional, narrated with feverish madness by its main character, Jose Renato, a thirty something year old geologist who is on a trip to survey and assess possible routes for a water canal.  I mean this quite literally; the film is a series of impressions, like a home movie; static snapshots of rocks and faces, and shaky handheld footage outside a car window, as if taken by the Renato himself, but with an unassuming assuredness that avoids the gimmicky self-awareness of films like Paranormal Activity.

Instead, what we get is the closest thing I’ve seen to ‘first person’ narrative in a film since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the voice-over is a direct line into Renato’s head, and intermittently interrupted by love songs on the radio, the film reads much like a stream-of-consciousness novel, its fleetingly raw images and detached sounds mimicking the logic of its increasingly delirious protagonist.  The reason for his turmoil?  Separation from the love of his life, the distance and time unbearable as he counts down the days until his return to her.  The open plains and desolate lives he encounters, never recalled in the present, but as luminous, sometimes hallucinatory memories, quiver between hopelessness and monotony; and as the isolation of the open, arid landscapes envelop him, his separation from his love is revealed to be possibly more permanent than first imagine.

The film is certainly not for everyone, and for the initial fifteen minutes, I must admit I felt frustrated.  I kept hoping to see Renato’s face, or for a dialogue scene to take place, giving us ‘present’ action (at no point at the film does this happen).  It was a hypocritical thought given how often I’ve espoused the merits of modes of story-telling other than the factory mould model shifted by Hollywood.  Gladly then, after those first fifteen minutes, I felt myself synchronizing with the rhythms of the film, intrigued by its harsh aesthetic and the pained brutality with which the main character dissembled each part of his life, leaving open sores to be stung by the desert wind.  The film is about memory and interiority, rather than stakes, conflict and resolution.  This first person subjectivity as the only mode of meaning is an unsettling experience; and in never allowing us to see Renato’s face, Gomes and Ainouz place us into the same space as its protagonist, allowing us to feel the desolate isolation of the spaces first-hand, as well as the desperate longing for any sort of human connection. 

I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You is a raw contemplation on alienation, and how solitariness can drive a man insane.  Some will find this film intolerably boring, but those seemingly interminable pauses are, I think the point – distance, space, and time, as much as anything, are as much reason as any in this unsentimental but deeply sympathetic examination, of how, and why, we love.