Entertainment

Totally awesome recall

Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee’s best subject has always been himself, whether it was in his hilarious search for a wife (his 1986 masterpiece “Sherman’s March”) or using his family’s possible connection to a Gary Cooper movie to quirkily explore his native North Carolina’s tobacco industry (2003’s “Bright Leaves”).

The beguiling “Photographic Memory” finds McElwee in middle age, standing by helplessly as his 21-year-old college-dropout son Adrian spurns dad’s offers to help launch Adrian’s own career-making films about daredevil stunts the elder McElwee finds unnerving.

The self-effacing McElwee decides he can become more empathic by retracing his own adventures at Adrian’s age. Shooting on video for the first time, McElwee returns to a small French town where he lived for a summer in 1971 in search of his former employer, a photographer, and a long-ago lover. What he finds in “Photographic Memory” is utterly delightful.