Michel Franco’s films, from Chronic to New Order to Sundown, have always made their home in needling, awkward places, asking questions to which there are no answers you’d really want to hear, so when early word on Memory was that it contained some of his ‘most harrowing’ stuff to date, that was quite the claim. That early word wasn’t wrong, per se, but what he has pulled off here – in what I think is easily his finest film to date – is remarkable in how it uses these initial provocations to tell such an eventually beautiful story about connection, redemption, and people desperately trying to not repeat the mistakes of their pasts.
At the heart of this is Jessica Chastain playing Sylvie, a carer for learning-disabled adults who has just reached her milestone of 13 years sober – a milestone that coincides pretty much exactly with the age of her daughter Anna (Brooke Timber). Still facing the demons of her addiction, as well as a profoundly traumatic past that is slowly and devastatingly spelled out, Sylvie is, when she isn’t working, almost a shut-in, and her fear of the world is starting to weigh on Anna, who is very obedient to her mum’s ‘never party, never meet a boy’ wishes but clearly wanting to pull away.
It’s a status quo defined by routine and rules, both of which are disrupted when Sylvie is followed home from a school reunion by Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), someone who Sylvie thinks was tangentially connected to the abuse she suffered at school. It’s a properly frightening sequence, Sarsgaard often just out of focus like a monster at the edge of the frame, but soon the much more innocent truth comes out – Saul and Sylvie were never at school at the same time, and he simply followed her home out of confusion.
See, Saul has early onset dementia; still mostly able to take care of himself (and be very charming and witty) but suffering increasingly dangerous lapses. Feeling guilty for what she almost accused him of, Sylvie agrees to take on a job as Saul’s carer, but it’s not long before lines are crossed as Sylvie starts to need Saul almost as much as he needs her. There’s, as might be evident, a lot of set-up here, but Franco handles it with the utmost grace. Every beat and note tells us something about his characters, allowing Chastain and Sarsgaard (who deservedly won Best Actor for this role at the Venice Film Festival) to fully inhabit a pair of extraordinarily good performances.
Everything is so mature and precise, Franco and his lead duo never putting a foot even slightly wrong. Even as the potentially overpowering presence of Sylvie’s estranged and vile mother is introduced to the plot, it slots in effortlessly, also allowing the otherwise slightly underused Merritt Wever, playing Sylvie’s much more affluent younger sister, one truly sublime scene. I’ve struggled to vibe with Franco’s films in the past, but what makes Memory so different is not that he’s changed up his bleak and naturalistic style, but that he’s finally allowed the light of hope in. It’s this chance at warmth that makes everything else here sing in one of the year’s most wonderfully clever, humane, and well-acted films.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 