Subhash K Jha 
Mexican director Michel Franco’s last film After Lucia was emotionally crushing. His new masterpiece Memory is even more devastating in its emotional impact. Memory was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, where it premiered on 8 September 2023.
The brilliant Peter Sarsgaard won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his performance. But really, this film belongs to the amazing Jessica Chastain. I have been her fan ever since I saw her in Terence Mallick’s The Tree Of Life. She conveys emotional heft without trying,or crying.
Ms Chastain is made for making history and not just movies. Memory is the latest in her unbroken string of exceptional performances. It is not short of a miracle how sorted she makes her complex confused character seem.
In Memory she is a single mother Sylvia grappling with bringing up a lovely teenaged daughter Anna(Brooke Timber) who, for a change in a single-mother film, is not troublesome. Rather, Anna is immensely supportive of her mother through some of the most traumatizing events that reveal themselves in Sylvia’s life as this languorously paced film , unwilling to explain itself to the audience, unfolds its emotional secrets layer by layer.
It is clear from the start that Sylvia is a troubled woman,in her body language and in the way she locks and double-locks her small sparse but comfortable apartment with her daughter(the recorded safety lock’s announcement ‘Armed Home’ becomes the voice of Sylvia’s troubled consciousness) .
One night after a party, a man follows Sylvia home,awakening all her dormant fears and insecurities. That man turns out to be Saul(Peter Sarsgaard) who suffers from the early symptoms of dementia.
The rest of the film is about how two broken people with a past history of suffering, come together against all odds.It would be wrong to see the anomalous relationship as a lovestory of two misfits. On the contrary in spite of being so underprepared to conform , Sylvia and Saul seem to reach hurdles in their relationship not so much through extraneous pressures but their own demons which they are constantly battling.
There is a memorable moment of natural awkwardness when Saul , staying over with Sylvia and her daughter Anna for the night, stops after going to the bathroom unsure which of the two bedrooms belongs to Sylvia.The maturity with which Anna negotiates her mother’s emotional complexities is not just commendable it is also symptomatic of the subtly skilled writing that goes into making Memory memorable.
Significantly director Michel Franco shoots the film mostly in detached long shots and mid shots, almost rendering the play of drama and documentary as the yin and yang of the central relationship. Memory is a rare and precious work, not easy to get into. It eschews embellishment and props, avoids leading the audience too close to the characters. But it is eventually a very satisfying experience.
