‘Memory’ romance a showcase for stellar cast
“Memory” is a romance about two severely damaged people who find one another and fall in love in Brooklyn. Sylvia (Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain) is an adult care-worker from a family with money. She lives in a semi-shabby, carefully locked and alarmequipped apartment near an elevated subway with her 13-year-old daughter Anna (Brooke Timber), who she walks to school every day. Sylvia will not allow Anna to attend parties with older boys.
One evening, Sylvia attends a high school reunion and a strange man sits beside her. His name is Saul Shapiro (Peter Sarsgaard), and he follows her home and stands outside Sylvia’s apartment in the rain. This may remind some viewers of the lover who dies after standing outside his beloved’s window in the rain in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”
Sylvia’s calls the man’s contact number, his brother Isaac (Josh Charles), who lives in a townhouse with his daughter and Saul. Sylvia, an AA member who has been sober since the birth of Anna, is hired by Isaac to care for Saul, who has early onset dementia. Saul seems lucid and fit.
But he had great gaps in his memory, gets confused and needs constant supervision. At the same time, he is a middle-aged man with feelings and desires.
The same is can be said for Sylvia, who at first accuses Saul of being one of two older boys at school who sexually abused her when she was a minor. That accusation hangs like an evil specter over the romance that blossoms between Sylvia and Saul. Something is also wrong with Sylvia’s relationship with the rest of her family, including her younger sister Olivia (Merritt Wever, “Nurse Jackie”), who plays a role in Sylvia’s life, and her widowed mother Samantha (Jessica Harper), who does not.
Written and directed by the Mexico City-born Michel Franco of the intriguing 2022 Tim Roth vehicle “Sundown,” “Memory” offers another showcase to its actors. The plot is full of fireworks. Sylvia may be too damaged by sexual abuse as a minor and the drugs and alcohol she turned to to numb the effects to be a viable romantic partner. But she puts up a surprisingly solid front. And after all, what is a viable romantic partner? Saul, whose prognosis is not discussed and who often walks around without his clothes, is not going to get any better and will probably slide down down a rabbit hole. As a romance, “Memory” is no frothy “Anyone But You.”
”Memory” is a romance floating almost proudly on a sea of grim with the constant refrain of Procol
Harum’s 1967 hallucinatory classic “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Saul’s favorite tune, in the background. Chastain turns down the pyrotechnics for a change, playing Sylvia as someone who needs to keep a tight grip on things.
Watching “Basquiat” with Saul, Sylvia’s weeps at a scene in which the protagonist is revived after an overdose. After making an unthinkable accusation against her mother in front of the family, Sylvia is later joined in the bathtub by a fully-dressed Saul. “Memory” makes the oddest shifts in tone and mood. “We skipped the light fandango,” indeed.
(“Memory” contains nudity, mature themes and profanity)