The new role from Mexican director Michel Franco will star actress Jessica Chastain, who won the coveted Golden Icon Award at the recent Zurich Film Festival for her interpretations that have made a lasting impression in the world of cinema. the seventh art, internationally.
Por Rafael Recuenco Gutierrez
Publication el 10/10/2023
WITHIlvia (Jessica Chastain) is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life: her daughter Ana, her job and her meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous. All this is thrown into the air when Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home to a reunion of former classmates. This surprise will have a strong impact on both of you when you open the door behind you.
This is the argument MemoryMexican director Michel Franco’s new film (1979) was presented at the Zurich Film Festival, accompanied by its leading lady and Oscar winner Jessica Chastian.
Moreover, the North American actress, thanks to her outstanding interpretive transcendence, won one of the most prestigious awards – the Golden Icon Award. At the time of the presentation, both considered themselves lucky to have found such a suitable actress-director as they were working together for the second time in three years. “The third film is on the way,” said Michel Franco.
Memory We enter into the life of Sylvia: working at a center for the disabled, alcoholics (who have spent 13 years sober), but most of all, a person accustomed to being harmed by a past abuser.
Chastain is in the shoes of a security-obsessed man: Silva isn’t safe until you lock the three locks on your door and set off the burglar alarm. So you should go to your hijjah with other guys from old age, and not go to parties and get angry when you meet them with a cigarillo of laughter among their things.
The good thing about all these details is that they are explained carefully, side by side, and the viewer is given a sense of the reality of what is happening, based on the passing of actions in silence, without the need for dialogue, which we can fully explain.
One of the key moments is Sylvia’s attendance at special gatherings of her former college classmates. And now we see her as an extraneous figure who drinks water with gas (the rest is relief) and has no relation to people.
That is, when Saul comes on the scene, that when she goes to her company and stops staying in this place where she feels offside, she finds herself close to home. Is there any reason why a man would stop you if he is a victim of gender-based violence?
Birth of love
Sylvia is healed, but to her surprise, the next day Saul continues to wait at the door of her house, washed away by the rain and sealed with a sack. When you call the phone number on your card, you will discover that you have dementia.
He later returns to him, he is alive and living in a house with his brother Isaac and sister. Saul gets better and writes everything down in a book to remember what his illness makes him forget. They walk through the woods and she accuses him of sexually abusing her when she was a 12-year-old girl and she was 17.
She gives her an ID collar and a phone number to call if they let her through and she leaves. When you’re about to take off the meter, you know what you want to do and you turn to resolve the situation you’re about to provoke.
Later today, your friend will tell you that you are mistaken about who you are, and that Saul went to college the same year you changed.
Meanwhile, Sylvia and Saul have developed a close relationship in which she helps him with clothes around the house, accompanies him on walks, watches movies and listens to music together.
But this relationship between sick and sick eventually turns into love, although both care about being accepted into the family, which is what they hope for.
Dangerous combination
Another visual element that stands out is the metaphorical division of space into very pronounced lines of composition – like the sign on the door of Sylvia’s house or like in the New York subway – which evokes claustrophobia and an interesting and aesthetic optical rhetoric.
As we see, this is a painful and dramatic story, but for a moment it seems that we are watching a comedy, because his crazy actions and his constant answers to “I don’t know” are combined into a theater of laughter. It’s no surprise that Peter Sarsgaard’s performance won the Copa Volpi, the Best Actor award, at the Venice Film Festival.
Before I explain in writing the reason for Sylvia’s behavior and who the person was that she bullied as a child, I will recommend this to the reader who lives with it. The viewer is eager to find out, and all this is revealed in the last act on the discussion stage.
A collaborative shot (more than five minutes) that requires no other pleasantries before the dramatic force of the moment. In any case, this is the best scene in the film, because if you open the cards, you will soon feel the inner pain of the main character.
Based on the amount of information, Memory This is a special drama with the acidity of mental illness and the interpretive tandem of cruel chemistry. Although for a moment the plot becomes monotonous, monotonous and silent, it is already in the third act that it is possible to excite the viewer and experience empathy in its purest and most painful state.
A story of such good love and such a brutal story of sexual abuse is a dangerous combination. Therefore, the viewer will stop at the first one. Therefore, for all people, light always prevails over darkness.
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Rafael Recuenco Gutierrez Graduated from the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain).
Trailer:
Rafael Recuenco Gutierrez
Image removed: Memory (2023).