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.
