Remember everything and nothing. The director of the film “Remember?” Valerio Mieli appeared before the audience of the 41st MIFF classic Italian – cheerful, gesturing, promising immediately after the film to go and eat “Russian piellies”. But his film was not a classic Italian movie about love. According to the references, it is closer either to the innovative “Eternal radiance of pure reason”, or to the complex “Lord Nobody”. Except it's not fiction. The idea of the film, which the director voiced in answer to my question after watching it, is this: how do certain events in life affect our memories? As long as we are in love and optimistic about life, we see the present, the past, and even the future from a certain angle. But it is worth life to go from white to black, as the usual memories do not disappear - they change, differently arranging assessments and impressions.
Two unnamed heroes - a man and a woman - meet at a party, meet, absent-mindedly joke, remember the past, spend the night together. She doesn't have any bad memories. He has a whole tangle of childhood injuries, youthful resentments and adult fear. She looks to the future. He's immersed in the past. They are like two communicating vessels, where depression and love move into each other until the delicate balance is reached.
The simple and fragile plot of the film becomes a real puzzle, because the video sequence is constantly interrupted by “inserts from the past” – but these are not banal flashbacks, but memories, and all the time changing, depending on what the heroes have in their hearts. The heroine remembers how her grandfather died in bed on a tree. But it can't be! He was in the garden under a tree, and childhood fantasy sent him up. What to say about adult fantasies...
“Remember?” is a movie-mood, with a very rich and rich audio sequence, in places similar to either a video clip or a terrible fiction about experiments on memory. But there is nothing more fantastic than love – found, lost, found, rejected, forgotten. Actors – Luca Martinelli and Linda Caridi – perfectly cope with the difficult task of playing not a few “split” characters, but to convey the sensations of their hero in the continuum of time and human relationships. “Now I have a really bad memory,” she says, and that moment, like everyone else, falls into the past to become a memory of the memory. And the simple question posed in the title of the picture: “Remember?” – can not be answered unequivocally. Because you can't remember the past. I can only remember my previous memory.