Director Walter Salles with Fernanda Montenegro and Vinícius de Oliveira

A retired schoolteacher ekes out her pension by writing letters for illiterate people at Rio’s main station. She’s cynical and outwardly hard-boiled; she doesn’t always post the letters as promised, sitting in judgement on feckless husbands and fathers. To me, this trashing the hopes of communication between people was as bad as (unwittingly?) selling Josué to possible organ-harvesters! (She does atone for both sins.) Reluctantly she ends up accompanying a motherless boy across Brazil to find (if they can) his father. I saw this when it came out and I am ashamed to say that the only scene i really remembered was the one with the lipstick and the vanishing truck driver.

It’s a slow road movie with redemption/rebirth as one of its journeys. The opening scenes reminded me of The Lunchbox, but probably more from the press of population than the way it was filmed (brilliant at following an individual through a crowd). I had forgotten the latent menace in the society it shows: a petty thief at the station is chased and killed. I don’t know if the religious references are “sincere” or just “cultural”: Isadora and Josué (both actors perfect) are looking for Jesus, his father, a carpenter with two other sons, Moisés and Isaías. There are images of the Madonna and Child in the film – but the publicity poster is of the child holding the woman. (So should I see the lipstick as blood/wine?) Dora talks of how forgetting is inevitable, but it’s clear that she can’t forget her own childhood memories. The ending went awry: Dora’s leaving abruptly is unkind, and the audience seeing her writing a letter on the bus (to an illiterate nine-year-old), doesn’t change that.