I’ve only seen two films by the Mexican director Michel Franco, one in Spanish set in Mexico and the other in English set in Southern California; and while I can see why one critic calls him a “shock auteur,” the kind of fatal characters he favors strike me as being conventional in terms of sensibility. It’s the circumstances in his stories that are extraordinary, not necessarily the people themselves. His latest is set in Brooklyn among white people who cover a wide range of middle-class experience, and everyone has a trauma to deal with, so their responses to everyday stimuli must be measured accordingly. 

We understand that Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a recovering alcoholic from the first scene, in which she is attending not her first AA meeting, but this time with her teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timer), in tow. Franco doesn’t give us much more to work with right away—nothing at all about the girl’s father or what may have been at the root of Sylvia’s addiction. She works at an adult day care center tending to people with developmental disabilities, and her daughter seems to spend a lot of time away from their apartment in a seedy neighborhood and at the nicer brownstone of Sylvia’s sister, Olivia (Merritt Wever), and her large family. Olivia is constantly trying to get Sylvia to be more social, and talks her into attending her high school reunion, which she isn’t too crazy about doing; and, sure enough, she spends most of her time alone in a corner while her former classmates party away. And then a bearded fellow, Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), seemingly materializes out of nowhere and sits beside her saying nothing. Spooked, Sylvia leaves and Saul follows her, still silent, all the way home, then sits in the rain outside her apartment all night. Franco continues to provide intelligence in a frustratingly elliptical fashion, but we eventually learn that Saul did go to the same high school as Sylvia and that he is now suffering from early onset dementia. At first, Sylvia thinks he is one of the boys who raped her when she was a teen—the trauma that drove her to drink?—and he claims to not remember anything about that, even though it’s his short-term memory that’s mainly affected by his condition. Further research concludes that he couldn’t have been a party to these assaults because he didn’t attend the high school at the same time Sylvia did, so now it’s Sylvia’s memory that is being challenged, mainly by her mother, Samantha (Jessica Harper), from whom Sylvia has been estranged since she became an adult but who is still close to Olivia. 

Ostensibly, Memory traces the relationship between Sylvia and Saul to its uncomfortable but inevitable ends, which raises alarms not only among Sylvia’s family but among Saul’s, since he lives with an over-bearing brother (Josh Charles) who is taking care of him. However, Franco’s dramatic intentions are much wider, encompassing the class distinctions that this relationship implies, the ways that trauma colors not only the victim’s behavior but that of the people in their orbit, and how mental illness cannot be addressed without taking into consideration the mentally ill person’s hopes and desires. Much of the careful, complex plotting is contrived, but Memory boasts some of the most believably compelling characterizations I’ve seen in a movie that’s all about white Americans, which is saying a lot these days. 

Opens Feb. 21 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280). 

Memory home page in Japanese

photo (c) Donde Quema El Sol S.A.P.I. De C.V. 2023