“It’s nice inside,” explains Merritt Wever’s Olivia to her mother (Jessica Harper) as they are driven to a wrong-side-of-the-tracks Brooklyn apartment in Michel Franco’s Memory. It is clearly a trip they are nervous about. As they sit in silence, a truck behind them accelerates forward, a threatening presence in an otherwise throwaway two-shot of the back seat of a yellow cab. It’s the sort of detail that is ordinarily accidental. Still, at this point in the film, half an hour in, I had already seen so much exquisite blocking in the direction that it felt like a sly subliminal terror tactic.
Perhaps it’s because Harper, the star of Suspiria, is the mother. She was the pin that stuck Argento’s madness to the frame, a tight and nervous face in the middle of a terrifying kaleidoscope, and she carries a bucketload of neurosis into this intrigue-laced inquiry into memory, too. Most of the cast does.
“…in his fifties and suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Why has Saul followed Sylvia?“
Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, a mother who works in the care field and a veteran member of Alcoholics Anonymous. When we meet her, Sylvia has her life together, but you can see it takes effort. She attends a high school reunion with her sister. As Sylvia sits alone at the edge of the room with her soft drink, a man looms out of the darkness like a spaceship, coming to sit next to her. She gets up and leaves. He follows. Sylvia runs home and locks the door. The man simply lies down outside in the cold until morning.
His name is Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), and he is in his fifties and suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Why has Saul followed Sylvia? Memory is at its best when playing with this thread, so I will dummy up on the plot now, except to say it gets into some pretty dark places or thinks it does. The whole thing is like a manifestation of Saul’s state of mind, a hall of breaking mirrors.
I’d seen none of Mexican director Michel Franco’s films before. He’s been hacking away for years, having already won Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2012. Based on this film, I would like to see more of his work. The filmmaker gets very strong performances. Chastain’s Sylvia is grounded and compelling. We see her life, tense but at least tidy, and worry about what will become of her if the shell of self-control she is wrapped in is breached.
"…oblique and beautiful..."
