A social worker, sober for 13 years, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) raises her daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) alone in her modest apartment. While accompanying her sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) to a high school reunion, Sylvia leaves the party when a man, Saul (Peter Sarsgaard, Best Actor winner at the Mostra), stares at her insistently. . The next morning, she finds it refrigerated and muddled in front of her house. She learns from Isaac (Josh Charles), Saul’s brother, that the latter suffers from early-onset dementia.
Shortly after, Sylvia confronts Saul, whom she mistakes for one of the boys who abused her as a teenager. Olivia tells Sylvia that Saul did not attend their school at that time. At the request of Sara (Elsie Fisher), Isaac’s daughter, Sylvia agrees to take care of Saul during the day. Despite illness, Sylvia begins an affair with Saul, but the return of Samantha (Jessica Harper), mother of Sylvia and Olivia, threatens to ruin everything.
Third feature film in English from Mexican director Michel Franco (Chronic, Sundown), Memory features characters that are larger than life, played with great nuance by actors at the top of their art. Camped in Brooklyn, whose Belgian cinematographer Yves Cape (The littleby Guillaume Nicloux) captures all the picturesque without ever giving in to postcard aesthetics, this half-tone drama benefits from a realistic style that commands admiration.
However, Franco has fleshed out his characters so much and complicated the main story that he neglects its too many layers. Thus, he leaves Sylvia’s suspicions about Saul hanging, as if he no longer knew what to do with them during the writing. The reunion between Sylvia and her mother, organized against the wishes of the first by Anna, gives rise to revelations which will be too little developed and then immediately evacuated.
Furthermore, the evolution of the relationship between this woman eaten away by painful memories and this man gradually sinking into the fog advances at such a lethargic pace that the reactions of those around them seem disproportionate. With its implausible finale, Memory reveals itself, despite its undeniable qualities, to be a dull and heavy melodrama which gets lost several times along the way.
In theaters in original English version
Drama
Memory
Michael Franco
Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Merritt Wever
1h40