Memory size. Review of the film by Michel Franco

Best film by Michel Franco. A heartbreaking melodrama between two people with “no past” that gives us a final embrace that we wish would last forever. VENICE80. Competition.

It’s never too late. And now the author, who for many years seemed repulsive to us with his cold and cerebral idea of ​​cinema, forces us – at least this time – to go back and take a different approach to this (impossible) love story between a woman and a man who… For various reasons I am forced to deal with my personality. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a single mother with a 15-year-old daughter who has a history of abuse and alcoholism. One evening she meets a mysterious man who begins to follow her without saying a word. The man stays outside the door all night. He sleeps on the sidewalk and loses consciousness. The next morning, Sylvia discovers that Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) is suffering from senile dementia. Why did he follow her? Is this related to his dramatic past? Or did a man who doesn’t remember anything fall in love with her?

New York is in the background, but with its subway crossings, walks in parks and apartment interiors, he is an additional hero, able to transform from prison to reinvented space depending on the mood of the heroes. And also beautiful A fading shade of pallor Procul Harum, a ’60s classic that Saul listened to obsessively, which gradually becomes the film’s soundtrack with an intensity reminiscent of a Martin Scorsese-directed sequence in New York Stories.

Of course, one can debate the extent to which Franco’s cinema always had a programmatic need to cling to dramatic and characteristic polarization, as if it had the ability to exist only in the constant evocation of pain. This is true. This time, however, breath, silence, heartbeats, trajectories and bodies live on the screen. Sylvia needs to forget the past, Saul needs to forget the past that he no longer remembers. The presence/absence of memory acts as glue between two characters who are somehow able to exist together for only brief moments: Saul’s short memory time on the one hand and the instinct to overcome the trauma of memories and finally begin to love again. , as if it were Sylvia’s “first kiss” or “first time in bed.” The whole film is about the desire – of the characters and the viewer – to see two different times. get to know each other and experience a love that can finally express itself freely “without a past.” So in a sense, Michel Franco’s eighth and clearly best film seems almost like a chamber melodrama, expanding on those wonderful 15 minutes The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonin which Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett met for a short time, almost the same age, living their love story and memories to the fullest.

“Sometimes it is marginalization that provides a way out of the shadows of the past, a chance to build a life in the present,” the director says about his film. So that’s it Memory it can be, paradoxically, only an ideal love story that can be viewed exclusively “here and now.” A dramatic and heartbreaking story, to be sure, but one about children in adult bodies that no one really understands except the daughter – the excellent Brooke Timber – who, unsurprisingly, ends up Deus Ex Machina, perhaps the only truly “mature character” in the film, capable of growing scene by scene. While Sylvia and Saul must somehow become teenagers again in order to be together (their first meeting, not coincidentally, is on a school anniversary) and leave their awkward families behind, the daughter is required to grow up within a year. film “For” see AND believe paired with. Thus, in a wonderful and unexpected ending, it is she who returns Saul to Sylvia and gives us the intensity of the last embrace, which, thanks to the cinema, can now last forever.