Memory review: Sex scenes are important, okay?
Two people, a woman who remembers too much and a man who doesn’t remember enough, sit on a fallen tree in a park. She accuses him of sexually abusing her when they were in high school together but he doesn’t remember if he’s guilty or who she even is.
This was the scene that inspired director Michel Franco to make Memory, his latest film, screening at the BFI London Film Festival.
Jessica Chastain is mum-of-one and recovering alcoholic Sylvia, haunted by the memory of childhood abuse. It has driven her to paranoia and fear, living a solitary life and forcing her daughter (Elsie Fisher) to live one alongside her.
Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) persuades her to go to a pretty lousy school reunion where she’s approached by a leery-seeming man, played by Peter Sarsgaard, who then follows her home and waits outside her house overnight until he collapses in severe weather.
He’s Saul and, it turns out, he is suffering from dementia. Sylvia is convinced he was an abuser of her back when they were teenagers but her own memory might be wrong.
She finds herself caring for him while balancing her own fragile family, estranged from her mother (a brilliantly scheming Jessica Harper) and desperately protecting her daughter from threats imagined and real (in one early scene she pointedly asks for a repairwoman for her fridge).
Franco admits he first envisaged Memory as a revenge film that hinged on that confrontation in the park, where Sylvia does, at first, attempt to exact some retribution.
But instead Memory becomes a tender love story about living through, and living with, trauma.
It would be churlish to describe any performance of Jessica Chastain as ‘revelatory’ given her track record, but her transformation into Sylvia is spell-binding.
Chastain, who did her own shopping at Target for her character’s costume, is all steely determination and stubbornness; there’s a fear in her she can’t escape from, even as daughter begs for some leniency and to live something close to a normal teenage life.
That is until Sylvia meets Saul and her icy defences, unwittingly, start to melt.
Sarsgaard won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at this year’s Venice Film Festival and with good reason.
There has been no shortage of excellent performances demonstrating dementia and memory loss (Anthony Hopkins in The Father and Julianne Moore in Still Alice come to mind).
But, as Sarsgaard stated: “A lot of time when we see dementia in movies, it’s the most extreme stage at the very end and it paralyses us all with fear, and I really didn’t want to depict that.”
Despite his illness Saul is charming and witty. He can’t remember what he usually orders at his favourite restaurant but he remembers it’s good.
It makes his relapses all-the-more terrifying and startling. One night, confused, he’s faced with two bedroom doors, one to a teenage girl, one to Sylvia. Franco cuts away from the confusion.
Sarsgaard and Chastain are both likely to enjoy significant Oscar buzz this winter for their performances as they try to navigate their own feelings and agency (does Saul even know what he’s doing?).
It’s the couple’s intimate scenes that really pull at the heartstrings. There is an energy and fragility to them, Sylvia scared of herself and her body, Saul still a gleeful and patient lover, perhaps because he doesn’t even remember Sylvia’s trauma-addled past.
Thanks to each other they are able to start to find solace with their own memories, or the lack of them, and with their own lives.
