intense drama with Jessica Chastain

“Memory”, p. Jessica Chastain AND Peter Sarsgaard and director Michelle Francois a film about two lonely souls who are reborn together and come to terms with their difficult past.

Index

“Memory” – All information

Plot

Sylvia and Sol meet, or rather, meet again, at a party of former school friends. He pursues her, reopening her painful wounds. A social worker and loving mother, Sylvia always seems to want to keep as much distance as possible from any man; he doesn’t talk to his mother and doesn’t allow his thirteen-year-old daughter to date boys her age. Saul follows her through the streets, into the subway, and all the way to her home, but the reason, as Sylvia discovers, has nothing to do with her or even her own past. Saul will enter her life and vice versa, overturning beliefs, lifestyles and feelings and allowing both, considered “different”, to be reborn.

Loans

• Direction: Michel Franco
• ThrowStars: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Weaver, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles
• Type: dramatic
• Duration: 100 min.
• Production: USA, 2023
• Distribution: Second Academy
• Date of issue:

Review

Strong sensitivity “Memory”

Presented in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival, Memory is an intimate and sensitive film that tells the story of the lives, struggles and daily routines of two lonely souls forced to confront every day the trauma of a past that will never leave them. A sweet film that tells about feelings, the purest and most innate, overcoming seemingly insurmountable boundaries. The parental rigidity of Sylvia’s character gradually becomes more and more understandable, while the character, already immediately characterized, is revealed through an irreparably “contaminated” personality and interiority. An evil that afflicts the protagonist, imperfect even before he learns the truth; reality and fiction intersect and then branch out more and more, and this real life plan becomes clearer and clearer, so everything in “Memory” takes on a different meaning.

Workshop Jessica Chastain AND Peter Sarsgaard, the latter is perhaps in its best performance yet and is likely eyeing a nomination at the next Oscars in 2024. With a look, a gesture, a movement, Peter Sarsgaard as Saul manages to express everything about the dramatic neurodegenerative state of senile dementia. With a few words and the lost, disoriented, disoriented eyes of a man who cannot and is no longer allowed to be self-sufficient. “Memory” works slowly, lightly, almost subtly, tracing scenes and stories, making them narratively intense, a tale of emotion, feeling, longing and torment. A film that, like Sunset, unfolds scene by scene, moment by moment, and which becomes more complete and clear, but at the same time abstract in the relationships it creates between the two main characters.

Two main characters and their world

While the two main characters meet and discover, Michelle Franco explores the relationship between mother and daughter, the contrast and clash of two generations. “Memory”, a very symbolic title, is Sylvia’s distorted memory, a memory that Saul is losing more and more every day, it is Sylvia’s painful memories, memories that Saul cannot recover. Thus, the two characters find each other without even really looking for each other, overcoming internal and external barriers, in the incredible confidence that emotions and feelings are the true driving force of life. Among the problems, inconveniences and obstacles, Sylvia and Saul could not meet, they could get to know each other and leave each other, but they choose not to do this, even when everything seems to indicate otherwise. And while the supporting characters outline paths of guilt and redemption, the relationships with the main characters open up other scenarios.

Final decision

Memento is an extremely subtle, elegant, almost nuanced film, with simple staging, linear direction, but full of intensity and sensitivity in the choice of shots that focus on the characters. The script itself is built on those words, on that confidence and conviction that only the two main characters could say, think and feel: Michel Franco works on perception, on an almost sensual story that allows us to grasp and grasp, first imperceptibly, then an overwhelming awareness, restless human soul. Sylvia is a woman tormented by trauma, suffering that has very distant origins, Saul is a man who is struggling with a condition that can worsen, causing him to lose contact with reality, but in their connection, in their human relationship, anything can become secondary, certainly important and difficult, but never impossible.

Trailer