#51 - Memento (2000)

I think I have never seen a film as hard to follow as Memento. I will probably watch it again later on, because the scenes are all scrambled and if a friend hadn't told me how to watch it I would have understood nothing. That's right. When you need instructions from a third party to understand a film, you know it's either a mess or a genius way to tell a story. I'll go with the latter.

The premise of the film is fantastic. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, who has anterograde amnesia (he cannot store new infromation, like, say, Drew Barrymore's character in 50 First Dates) as a result of an attack that also ended the life of his wife. He decides his wife deserves a proper revenge and starts diong his own investigation. Due to his condition he uses a series of photographs, tatoos and notes to keep a record of what he discovers since he can't rely on his memory. It's a great, original premise: a rare treat, given that Hollywood is so keen on remakes, adaptations, reboots, reimaginings, etc. nowadays.

   

Shelby's clues even guide the audience better than the plot.

Since the theme of the film is memory loss and all that, the narrative style is very weird. Here's how it goes: you have both color and black and white scenes. The black and white scenes are all in chronological order, while the color scenes are in inverse order. All of the black and white scenes together show the events before a murder that takes place in the climax of the film, and the color scenes show the events after it happens. It is incredibly messy but if you keep that in mind you can actually follow the plot without getting mixed up. I said multiple times I like Tarantino's non-linear style of storytelling, but the narrative structure Christopher Nolan came up with for this film takes the cake.

   

Here's a graphic if it helps you understand it better than my shitty explanation.

The characters on this film aside from Shelby, who has the spotlight at almost all times, are pretty good. I found Natalie (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) very appealing and the non-linear style helps a lot to develop her. The theme of unreliability and self deception is always present and that affects the characters as well, too. A contact of Shelby, Teddy, perfectly reflects this: Shelby even keeps a picture of his tagged "Don't believe his lies".

Memento is one of those movies that you have to watch a couple of times to make sense of it better. But one go was enough to say this is a genius film I highly recommend.