Film - Jonathan Romney is dazzled by a complex portrait of amnesia
I tend to take a lot of notes during press screenings: the more intriguing the film, the more notes. Sometimes, I write so much that I miss entire chunks of film. Then, when it comes to writing a review, I can't always read my own writing, or remember exactly what a note means. So reviewing ends up being largely a process of deciphering my own notes and reconstructing in my mind the film they supposedly refer to (but which I may already have half- forgotten). This probably means that my reviews are inaccurate and unreliable; but, if so, they are no more unreliable than anybody else's, or than memory itself.
This condition is more than pertinent to Christopher Nolan's extraordinary thriller Memento, in which the hero is similarly confounded by his own note-taking. Best not to reveal too much about the plot: Memento has so many narrative twists that the entire film is effectively one continuous twist from start to finish (or rather, from finish to start). But the story in this fiendish puzzler is as much to do with what happens to the viewer as to the hero: we are put through much the same cognitive hoops. But not quite the same.
If this is getting a little mystifying (and the film is mystifying, thrillingly so), let's cut to the chase. Memento is at heart a film noir in classic 1940s vein - the story of a man investigating his wife's death. True to form, there is a mysterious femme fatale (Carrie-Anne Moss, from The Matrix) and a sly, ambivalent character (Joe Pantoliano) who could be friend or foe. The first twist is that the hero and narrator, Leonard (the crisply nervous Guy Pearce), suffers from short-term amnesia and forgets things almost as soon as they happen. The second twist is that the story is told backwards - it starts with Leonard getting his revenge and taking a Polaroid to prove it to himself. But his bullet returns to the gun and the photo fades, then slides back into the camera. This is something more than an echo of the reverse storytelling of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Here, it is as if events erase themselves the instant they occur - which, in Leonard's mind, is exactly what happens.
The director and co-writer, Christopher Nolan, is a specialist at temporal dislocation - he played similar games in his shamefully underrated debut, the no-budget London thriller Following. He is now based in the States, and the very Californian Memento, adapted from a story by his brother Jonathan, shows Nolan continuing every bit as uncompromisingly as he began - if anything, upping the ante of mathematical rigour. If Memento is a brainy whodunnit, comparable with smart puzzlers such as Seven and The Usual Suspects, it is also a philosophical investigation along the lines of Atom Egoyan's tales of dislocated subjectivities, or Siegel and McGehee's overlooked 1993 meta-noir movie, Suture, another Rubik's-cube riddler about amnesia and identity.
Like any whodunnit detective, Leonard is at once investigating a story and constructing it; he is both reader and writer. We start off in his position, as much in the dark as he is. But the more we learn, the more he forgets. And whenever we think we know more than he does, some new enigma comes along to redress the balance. A bizarre narrative construction keep us shifting in and out of focus. Each section of the main story begins in mid-action, so that we do not know what is happening any more than Leonard does: it is like walking in to the middle of a film, over and over again. But each section ends just where the previous one started, in a reverse-cliffhanger structure, leaving us relieved about the ends of events, but baffled about their beginnings. To make things more complex, another strand, apparently chronological, is interspersed between episodes - but is it happening before, after or during the rest?
Consider this, too: whenever any new character or plot development is introduced, it does the opposite of thicken the plot, as would usually be the case. Because the story is told backwards, we already know that anything new must disappear almost as soon as it is introduced. So we cling desperately to any traces that promise hard evidence - tyre tracks, the scratches on Leonard's face, his Polaroids, the urgent, indelible memoranda he tattoos on his skin under the confident rubric "The Facts". But no traces are trusted; Leonard is warned more than once just how unreliable evidence can be. But then, he is an unreliable detective, and the ultimate unreliable narrator. Try getting a foothold on this shifting sand.
Memento is by no means easy to follow, but I am convinced that it all adds up: this is a ruthlessly well-mapped story, where The Usual Suspects only appeared to be up until its shaggy-dog ending. Film-studies Derrideans will just about drool, but Memento is also dazzlingly entertaining, emotionally rich as well as cerebral. There is a heart-rendingly poignant story about another amnesiac, and a devastating turn of events when Leonard learns he is fated to be betrayed and is powerless to prevent it (although his worst and most consistent betrayer is himself). And there is a spectacularly cruel gag with a glass of beer. By the end of Memento, you will be aching to see it again, just to be sure whether you read it right the first time. You might want to take notes yourself.
Memento (15) is released nationwide on 20 October
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