Totally forgettable rendered memorable by a couple of remarkable performers, MEMORY has an infuriating yet beguiling quality.
Memory misplaced, memory mistaken, MEMORY takes what is remembered and dismembers it, a cracked mirror that distorts reflection, giving myriad perspective.
Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, a single mother and recovering alcoholic whose traumatic past is triggered after a chance encounter with Saul, a former schoolmate who apparently stalks her after their high school reunion.
Peter Sarsgaard plays Saul who suffers from early onset dementia. Convinced that he sexually abused her as a child, Sylvia confronts Saul who professes no recollection of such an occurrence, is mortified by the accusation.
Turns out, her memory has been muddied, a sullied tributary feeding toxic sediment into her stream of consciousness. As an atonement for her false accusation, she agrees to become Saul’s carer and what started as a fear and loathing relationship evolves into a strangely symbiotic one.
As this relationship evolves, both are forced to face buried memories and personal hardships, of psychological trauma and neurological damage.
Written and directed by Michel Franco, MEMORY is a mind field of figment, fragment and fracture, of facts made fiction and fissures within families that create fault lines of cataclysmic chasm.
Stemming from a sexually abused past, Sylvia is super strict with her daughter, Sara, in matters of dating and compulsively obsessed with the security of their apartment with a series of locks and alarms engaged.
Saul is a source of anxiety for his brother because of his chronic forgetfulness and his potential to go missing, to disappear without a trace.
Franco employs repetition as a narrative choice, which may infuriate some audiences, prompting accusation of padding. But the payoffs are worth the pace and deliver on the riff of Saul’s favourite song, Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale.
Frustration yields. MEMORY lingers.
