"Where are you João Gilberto?"

The French-Swiss director Georges Gachot has made some remarkable films that bring us very close to the legends of Música Popular Brasileira. He has portrayed Maria Bethânia, Nana Caymmi and Martinho da Vila and in doing so - as in his excellent feature about the otherwise camera-shy pianist Martha Argerich - created an unaffected, intimate closeness to these protagonists that contributes greatly to the understanding of their music. It is precisely this strength that he can use in the film Where are you João Gilberto? cannot play out. This is partly due to the concept of the film itself, but also to the rather dubious artistic significance of the singer who is the subject of the search.

Gachot withholds Gilberto, who is deliberately hiding from the public, from the audience in several ways. Firstly, he only approaches him indirectly by retelling someone else's search: The late German journalist Marc Fischer had failed in his attempt to get close to the bossa nova pioneer and had written a book about it. The film also traces how Gachot tries to follow Fischer's research, which means that two absentees already block direct access to the Gilberto phenomenon. There is actually a third: Gilberto's daughter Bebel, who apparently had contact with her father during the filming, but who also remains a phantom. Thus, for long stretches, all we have to do is follow travel banalities, phone calls that lead nowhere, conversations that produce no results, even with Gilberto's ex-wife Miúcha. We learn a little - too little - about the bossa nova culture from episodic encounters with greats of the style, above all Marcos Valle and Roberto Menescal, in which the music itself is sometimes - also too little - mentioned.

One would accept all this if João Gilberto's game of hide-and-seek actually had a deeper aesthetic meaning that would shed light on a highly fruitful era in Brazilian music history. Although João Gilberto is considered one of the fathers of bossa nova, the style was decisively influenced by others, in particular Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes as well as Marcos Valle, Roberto Menescal, Carlos Lyra and Edu Lobo, among many others. In today's Brazil itself, we dare say, João Gilberto is by no means held in the same esteem that he enjoys among the ageing, educated middle-class European jazz and world music audience. Most Brazilians probably couldn't care less where and why he is presumably holed up in a hotel room in Rio.

This search for Gilberto is particularly irritating in view of Brazil's current highly explosive political and artistic situation, and seems like a kind of denial of reality: While everything seems to be going downhill in the country, Gachot bites into an irrelevant side aspect of a golden era of Música Popular Brasileira that has long since passed. Where are you João Gilberto? becomes a well-made, at times atmospheric nostalgia flick - but with the wrong theme at the wrong time.