One of the last showings at lamentably short-lived Exit Art’s Digimovies, long-titled I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You/Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo scratched out a mere week’s screening here after Venice in 2009. A unique travelogue-slash-road movie, it is even more subjective cinema than classic example Lady in the Lake, in which director-star Robert Montgomery is seen once in the flesh and in a mirror.

In the Brazilian film, José Renate (Irandhir Dos Santos) is never seen, although his voice is guide throughout the seventy-five minutes and his journey to his vulnerable lonely inner self is what it is all about. As he drives through the arid Sertão scrubland of the Northeast -- many shots are what he sees through the windshield -- his at-first seemingly ordinary male persona is peeled like an onion to reveal, to him and the audience, the insecure relationship-failure he actually is. (An ill-advised Acapulco cliff-divers coda would indicate newfound self-awareness and a new leaf.)

Director-writers Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes have done excellent work separately (though co-writing with each other) -- Madame Satã and Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures, respectively -- and also teamed up since 1996. Their first feature together, though not wrapped until after others, I Travel is as well montage homage to the poor interior from which their grandparents (and hundreds of thousands more) had emigrated and which the filmmakers had never visited.

Paralleling modern life, it is a potpourri “visual audio album” of sensory sources: cassette recordings, radio, tire whines, snatches of poetry and direct song -- from which, the title; stiffly posed stills and jumpy, grainy handheld over- and underexposed DVCam, Super 8 and High 8; “interviews,” religious processions and bands in nowhere pickup taverns.

Over all of it sounds the voiceover commentary, memory and rumination of unseen José. The thirty-five-year-old trained geologist is here doing advance fieldwork for a canal projected to carry water from the only nearby river of any size and, incidentally, scout out the back-of-beyond poor to be relocated from longtime family lands. Scientifically suited for the assignment, he records the terrain and its composition, with particular expert’s attention to the mineral types which are shown in their strata, crystals and bright colors brought out through magnification.

Precise notations of time and location -- “Day 3, road BR-432, km 32, alt 450m” -- give way to observations about life, love and the invisible first-person speaker himself. His frequent grumblings bemoan the area while counting to the hour the days going by and those that remain. Lonely, he remembers biologist wife Joanne, the “Blondie” back home in Fortaleza who taught him to appreciate the plant kingdom to complement the mineral.

In purposely amateur video, the depressing seedy roadside motel rooms soon prompt a stop at a (relatively) better place. There he spends the night with Larisa, the first of a series of backcountry hookers, their names and ages -- Jessica, Shirley, María de Fátima, Michelle, Cláudia Rosa, Paty -- voice-recorded, their images caught, their limited aspirations of “leisure-life” divulged in answer to his offscreen prompting.

Amidst images of real people encountered in real relationships, real and remembered flowers and artificial foam roses, his mind balances love and hate, “I love you, I hate you,” soon clarified in the frank “Every marriage is perfect until it ends.” Blondie “dumped me” and will not even accept phone calls, and he emerges as the loser, boozer and womanizer he likely was in marriage and still is.

The inner landscape of emotional desolation outweighs the natural one outside.

He tells himself -- and eavesdroppers us -- the road trip was “to lose myself in some labyrinth.” But a traveler carries his personal baggage with him, and this one comes to admit that “it’s me I can’t stand.” His own shrink, he arrives at the cause beneath the self-deception.

Dramatized as narrative by its narration, ITBIHTICBBILY is able to free-associate just as the human mind does. The journey is pilgrimage which circles inwards to the heart of love and failure. This Joe makes it, though in life few do and even fewer by their own devices.

(Released by FiGa; not rated by MPAA.)