Memory

A biting but finally tender love story about animosity, reconciliation, trauma, and mental health between two estranged classmates from high school offers a deeply engaging and liberating film experience. Memory now marks the seventh feature by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, who, at only 44, continues to make these small art-house movies. He ends up taking a step back from his austere provocations and delivers his most affecting film yet. Coming right after his acclaimed but highly overlooked Sundown (which made my top 10 last year and remains underseen), Memory offers another smaller, character-driven story about characters shielding themselves from their past. While far more accessible and less austere than Sundown, Memory is still an artful film, with wrenching performances from its lead performers, Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, who are in top form here just as Tim Roth was in his lead role in Sundown.

While Franco holds similarities to Michael Haneke in terms of execution and tone, Franco deserves credit for showing a more delicate side with this film. While it appears that the film will be another bleak exercise in fatalism and despair for Franco, he restraints himself and builds a rather moving story that offers a lot of complexity and nuance. The film builds up all of Franco’s sensibilities, but the payoff in Memory is the most satisfying and moving ending he has staged thus far. The film opens up as if it’s going to be just more art-house trickery, as Sylvia (Chastain) encounters Saul (Sarsgaard) at her 20-year high school reunion. Saul begins to draw triggers on Sylvia; he observes her for a while from across the room.

He ends up approaching her and engaging in a conversation about high school memories, and this draws an instant trigger on Sylvia, and she instantly walks out of the banquet hall of the reunion. To make things more startling, he ends up following her all the way from the reunion to her apartment. Sylvia awaits in her apartment and tells her pre-teen daughter, Anna (Brooke Timer), to go back to bed as she continues to see him lurking near the downstairs of her apartment. Franco effectively builds up mystery from the start, as we don’t know these characters or their pasts as we await something unsettling to occur.

Courtesy Ketchup Entertainment

Sylvia ends up pacing Saul, who keeps looking up at her apartment and tells her daughter to go back to bed. She wakes up the next morning to see Soul sleeping on a rainy sidewalk. We learn that Saul suffers from early-onset dementia, and he doesn’t recall how he ended up outside Sylvia’s apartment. With concern, Sylvia ends up checking on Saul a few days later at his home, who is being taken care of by his brother, Isaac (Charles). They end up taking a walk together, and the plot of the narrative thickens once Sylvia alleges that Saul was one of the men who sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers back in high school, something that Saul has no remembrance of.

It raises some fascination questions about redemption, and Franco builds up some potential character motivations. How can Sylvia even stomach the sight of Saul? How can she forgive him? Does she pity him now for his illness? Franco actually channels his story away from such ambiguities and moral conundrums and spares Saul once we realize his time in school doesn’t match up to her timeline. The film ends up becoming a resonant love story about two people trying to use their romance to shield themselves from a world they feel inadequate in. While far less sensory than Sundown, Memory is no less contemplative. Franco started to show his humanist side with Sundown, opening a compassionate side about a dying man of privilege attempting to save the brief time he has left before it slips away to the fleeting essence of time. In Memory, he opens his empathy and heart even wider and recaptures some of the same themes.

Courtesy Ketchup Entertainment

From there, the film becomes a portrait of two people in emotional turmoil, and the passion and chemistry between the two increase masterfully with each passing moment of the film. There is a physicality between Chastain and Sarsgaard that recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman, as both characters are locked in a perpetual state of emotional anguish. For Sylvia, her past sexual abuses torment her. Saul attempts to find the most joy with Sylvia and live out the memories in small joys before they evaporate away. He also begins to realize that his brother holds too much control of his finances and begins to take control of his own free will in spite of his illness. Meanwhile, Sylvia doesn’t get support from her mother, Samantha (Jessica Harper), who denies that assault ever occurred, yet Sylvia’s younger sister, Olivia (Merrit Wever), can confirm that the abuses occurred. There is a wrenching moment in the film where Sylvia confronts Samantha about how she was complacent with the assault during a master shot in the living room that is earth-shattering to watch.

Fittingly, Franco builds up a film that could have been cynical and grueling, but by the movie’s end, the characters are given a great amount of sincere character depth and honest vulnerabilities, and the relationship between Sylvia and Saul together captures the fleeting moments of joy before time evaporates away from the emotional forces of anxiety, depression, or cognitive decline. Franco implicates a brilliant finale about the encroachments of memory with a dose of ambiguity and catharsis via a final image that I will not spoil. Franco also utilizes the glorious song of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale that is used so sublimely throughout the film. It certainly recalls Scorsese’s vignette in New York Stories and its used just as beautifully. Ultimately, what could have been a manipulative love story about disease and unconditional love becomes a 95-minute compassionate work of staggering versatility that is laced with hope.

MEMORY opens select theaters Friday, December 22nd, 2023, and expands Friday, January 5th, 2024.