Memory review – survivors grapple with an unstable past in a delicate, painful duet

Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard excel in Michel Franco’s absorbing story about the unnerving reunion of a care worker and a friend from her past

Mexican film-maker Michel Franco, famed for his icily contrived, pitilessly controlled dramas, often shown in static tableau scenes, has made another of his complex, painful and densely achieved movies; at Venice it won its leading man, Peter Sarsgaard, the Volpi cup for best actor. It is about abuse, violence, recovery and the redemptive power of sexual intimacy, but also about just what its title proclaims: memory, and how this accumulates over a lifetime to form an identity. Yet memory is unreliable building material; memory is the uncertain support underneath us, but solid as a crushing burden above us, a destructive gravitational force that could annihilate us entirely. And apart from anything else, memory is not necessarily the truth, so attempts to deny it are not necessarily dishonest or delusional.

This movie has the same piercing clarity as Franco’s other films, and two exceptionally intelligent leading performances, but with a warmer and more emollient outcome – so much so that you might wonder if the pill hasn’t been sugared, just slightly. Audiences might, moreover, be sufficiently vulgar (like me) as to wonder if there isn’t going to be a big third-act reveal. But Franco is entirely justified in aiming more for the non-narrative messiness of life itself.

Sylvia, played by Jessica Chastain, is a social worker and care worker, a single mother with a smart teen daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber). She is a recovering alcoholic and has been sober 13 years – as long as her daughter has been alive. We see her at the end of an AA meeting, and never hear her disclose her avowed reasons for being an alcoholic. Has she shared these with the group? We can’t tell. Her status as a care worker has a resonance with Franco’s previous film, Chronic, which shows the professional intensity of the worker’s relationship to the patient: a relationship almost erotic in its closeness.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/Eo3kq4b

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