There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable film.
It starts out like many a kitchen sinker – at an AA meeting where Sylvia, its hero, is just one of many unfortunates trying to put life back together after getting too friendly with the bottle. Then it follows her to her workplace. A day centre for adults with learning difficulties, a job that seems to be written into the constitutional expectations of this sort of film. Then on to a high school reunion, where Sylvia is distant and uninvolved. We surmise that she once used alcohol as a social crutch and is now struggling without it.
And then the odd thing happens that sends the film off on its own flight path. A guy plonks himself down next to her while Sylvia’s sister is dancing. Sylvia’s reaction is to flee. The guy follows her out into the cold night in his shirt sleeves. Follows her onto the subway, at a distance. The next morning when Sylvia peeks out from behind the curtains in her apartment, the guy is still there, outside, soaked to the skin and shivering in the rain, with a couple of bin liners half draped over his shoulders for warmth.
Against all expectation these two fall into a kind of relationship. Saul, it turns out, has dementia and needs looking after. Sylvia has soon been co-opted by his brother and niece to take on the job. These two differently damaged people bizarrely find their missing bits interlock. Meanwhile, at a different level entirely, the issues continue to resonate.
We enter spoiler territory here and fall back on the performances of Jessica Chastain as Sylvia, a woman who thinks she recognises this guy from high school, and for all the wrong reasons. Saul, played by Peter Sarsgaard, does not recognise much at all, since his dementia means what he can clearly remember ebbs and flows.
They are delicate performances full of finesse. Chastain all self-righteous and self-doubting at the same time, the woman who is nursing a scar from her childhood and thinks Saul was somehow involved in her psychological wounding. Sarsgaard plays Saul as a man who’s decided to be light-hearted about his selfhood slipping through his fingers, since he has no other choice.
What part does memory play in identity? If Saul can’t remember something terrible he once did to Sylvia, does that mean he’s now innocent? What if Sylvia has remembered it all wrong? How do you weigh a forgotten memory over a falsely remembered one, and who does the weighing? Franco also seems keenly interested in blame and how it gets chucked about and sometimes sticks in the wrong place, particularly when children are doing the flinging.
Magically and with great skill, Franco balances the bitter and the sweet. His film manages to be both lovely and a bit disturbing. Even as it winds into the territory staked out by movies like Festen – dark family secrets – it has a lightness of touch, as if we were watching a French New Wave movie in which a gamine beauty and a louche man of the world get it on, or its Hollywood update in those 1970s character-driven movies everyone stopped making once Star Wars came along.
There are other performances that help it fly – Brooke Timber is particularly good as Sylvia’s daughter, holding her own against Chastain and Sarsgaard as the daughter who is protective and yet wary of her mother, and prefers the company of her aunt (Merritt Wever) and even her prickly grandmother (Jessica Harper), who Sylvia hasn’t spoken to in years. There are no bad performances here, though, no bad moments either.
This is Mexico City native Franco’s fourth feature in English. There’s a strong element of family dysfunction in most of them. The dysfunction/social-issue drama can be rather wan but this grips hard like a thriller. It speaks volumes that Chastain, who could work with anyone, is also making her next film, Dreams, with Franco.
Memory – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
