Posthumous Memoirs comes out as a cross between Da (1988), an eccentric biography of a writer’s father wherein the father turned up throughout as an annoying ghost, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005), which was partly a story about a man attempting to tell his lifestory that ended up sidetracking off into numerous digressions. Although more than anything, what Posthumous Memoirs resembles is the original Heaven Can Wait (1943), a story about a compulsive womanizer telling the story of his life and numerous affairs. Both Posthumous Memoirs and Heaven Can Wait adopt fantastical narrative devices that involve the narrating character being dead – in Heaven Can Wait, the womanizer tells his lifestory to The Devil while in the afterlife waiting to know his eternal judgment, while in Posthumous Memoirs the central character is a ghost who tells his lifestory direct to the audience.

Director Andre Klotzel does a decent job of portraying the historical period on a medium budget – the panoramic views of scenes and historical events are all represented by paintings, for instance. There are good performances from all involved – both Reginaldo Farias and Petronio Gontijo as respectively the older and younger versions of Bras Cubas do a fine job of evoking sympathy for a flawed character. Occasionally the historical drama achieves some penetrating insight into its characters, but mostly the film ends up being a warm and quite likeable recount of a rogue’s memoirs. What you end up liking the film for are the eccentric pieces of wit packed away – the witty little monologues about meditation and the purpose of the nose throughout the history of civilization, or with Bras debating about the nature of clothing and its function in promoting desire.

Posthumous Memoirs is perhaps only of peripheral interest as a fantasy film. The ghost character is at most a playful narrative device. Nevertheless it is an amusing contrivance that Andre Klotzel and Reginald Faras do have some amusement with. Faras frequently stops and even pauses action to address the audience direct and at one point even rushes in to stop his younger self from strangling Lobo Neves and then reruns the scene in a much more placid way. There are occasional moments where the film touches upon more than this – a scene where Reginald Faras tosses a coin and it is picked up and pocketed by his younger self; and in particular a surreal hallucination of the dying Bras – where he sees himself as a prayer book with his hands as the clasps and his face looking out, then riding across an icy landscape on a statue of a hippo, before being picked up in the fingers of the goddess of nature.