Review of the movie Memory

In Ukrainian cinemas, you can watch the festival’s best-selling love drama Memory starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, for whose performance the latter won an award at the Venice Film Festival. The story is about how even when memory turns life into a continuous wound that never heals, or vice versa, when memory is almost completely erased, leaving a gap on top of a gap and turning life into a colander, we still instinctively remember how to love.

The Mexican director Michel Franco, who previously won the Grand Prix at the same Venice Film Festival for his tough socio-political dystopian thriller The New Order, combined two stories that, if told separately, would be quite ordinary dramas, moreover, gloomy and heavy, Oscar-winning and tormenting.

One would be dedicated to a woman, a single mother, who overcame alcoholism, which she suffered from for many years because her twelve-year-old daughter was drunk and forced to perform oral sex by older boys at school; But she has not overcome her fear of men, which makes her constantly panicky and paranoid, does not allow her daughter to go to parties and dates, does not have contact with the opposite sex whenever possible (only with the safe incapacitated people she looks after at her social work; she even calls the handyman with a special request to send a woman), and locks her apartment with a bunch of mechanical and electronic locks.

The second story would be about a sad man without a wife and children, who, although not old, suffers from dementia and learns to come to terms with his new situation, with memory lapses, loss of intelligence, and a return to the limited abilities of childhood, when his lack of intelligence does not allow him to understand the plots of movies, but his senses allow him to enjoy music.

So if the two lines were told separately in two separate films, neither story would have become something original, something truly exciting, different from standardized personal dramas. But Franco non-trivially combines two stories and two worlds into one, and it’s much more effective (not to mention elegant) than the next best thing to a typical Hollywood world unification King Kong and Godzilla, although here, too, each of the characters, a woman with a deep trauma of the past and a man with an uncompromising defeat of the present, is a dramatic “titan” in his own right.

We can say that the writer-director Michel Franco told four stories in one plane. These are the already mentioned separate plots of the heroine, who coexists with the consequences of rape, and the hero, who coexists with the new reality of the vents in his head, as well as two postplots of fusion and symbiosis. One of them is potential but unrealized, i.e. the author seems to offer it to the audience, but later refuses.

This is a story in which a man with dementia turns out to be one of those high school freaks who raped a girl-child with alcohol and their headless pubescent penises, but due to nervous degeneration, he no longer remembers the sins of his youth and, accordingly, is unable to atone for them. So the heroine Chastain finds herself in a dilemma: on the one hand, she hates and wishes only evil to the man who broke her psyche and broke her life, but on the other hand, she feels pity and even sympathy for the man who, thanks to God’s punishment or a natural accident, no longer has anything to do with the rapist.

It is good that in the end Franco refuses the idea of a brutal and radical conflict that makes possible an extremely deviant love between the victim and the perpetrator on the basis of the hypothetical idea that one memory can be corrected and the other erased. Because then the film would have lost its tenderness and delicacy, the romantic mood would have turned into a mood of permanent anxiety and cumbersome embarrassment, and feminists would have accused the director of trying to justify or at least forget sexual violence. That is why the fourth plot eventually unfolds on the screen, where non-standard, but not “criminal” love simply happens.

The author talks about love as a phenomenon that is not universal, which is found at every step between all people on the planet and thus becomes somewhat cheaper, but is truly rare and special, possible only if “the planets are in line.” For her, the only possible form of love for a man is if the man does not pose a threat, and it is dementia, as a return to “childhood” (to vulnerability, defenselessness, and the inability to harm an adult male) that fits the hero into this “requirement,” this “condition.” In other words, The Memory of Love tells a love story that could only have happened between him and her, because a woman without her trauma would hardly have fallen in love with a man with dementia, and a man without dementia would hardly have followed a strange woman and gotten lost in her front door.

Chastain and Sarsgaard are extremely fragile and touching in these feelings, like teenagers who have had their first very fragile and sensitive love, like a soft sprout that cannot withstand the rain and wind, but still breaks out of the ground and grows. Actually, this is really the “first” love, because she hardly had any previous ones due to her trauma and alcoholism, and her intimacy was hardly dictated by emotion rather than fog in her head, and he has forgotten everything that happened before (although he remembers his dead wife, his memories are more like echoes of past lives). And it seems that Michel Franco has made the most adult movie about first love of all.