Christopher Nolan’s cult experimental neo-noir starring Guy Pearce premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2000.
Leonard (Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia and has been unable to form new memories since his wife’s murder. The search for her murderer has become his obsession. He has tattoed his body with clues and his pockets are filled with polaroids of objects and people. The story of his revenge unfolds in reverse—starting with the committed murder— and gradually comes together like a puzzle.
Nolan’s Memento is a striking example of his conceptualist approach to filmmaking that brought him universal acclaim in the early 2010s. Before The Dark Knight introduced realism to superhero stories, and Inception radically transformed the spy action film by moving the action into the realm of subconscious and dreams, Nolan worked with smaller stories, but his methods were just as ambitious.
Presenting one storyline in reverse, Nolan creates a fragmented narrative told by an unreliable narrator: a protagonist obsessed with his idea of revenge, which he believes to be fair. Thus, the classical antihero noir premise about a man trying to avenge the murder of his wife, becomes a comment on the self-destructive nature of revenge and the self-perpetuating cycle of violence.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Memento
Christopher Nolan
USA, 2000. 113 min.
18+