更新时间:2019-07-31
他他 • 记住:[Film Review] Remember (2015) 7.6/10
Atom Egoyan’s REMEMBER is a linear-structured retribution thriller revolving around an octogenarian Holocaust survivor Zev Guttman (Plummer), transiting North America to track down the murderer of his family in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the WWII, whose alleged name is Rudy Kurlander and Zev has four candidates on paper (a minor plot hole is that one of them arguably can be eliminated beforehand for his age, which could have saved Zev much trouble and legwork), and as far as to stretch the narrative length, it is always the last one on the list who turns out to be one he looks for, but Benjamin August’s efficiently brilliant script strenuously paves for a last-minute bombshell to leave audience plumb slack-jawed.
Zev has a condition, he is ailed by dementia, or Alzheimer’s, so only with the aid of the written instructions from his fellow nursing home resident, the wheelchair-confined Max (Landau) - another surviving Jew who alleges that both him and Zev’s families were dispatched at the hands of the said Rudy Kurlander, whose real names is Otto Wallisch, which leaves the ambulatory Zev the only one left to execute their revenge plan - a doddering Zev can sneaks out the nursing home and doggedly carries on his mission with intermittent bouts of dementia to undermine his cognizance.
While the final twist is a total game changer, Egoyan and August conscientiously leave subtle clues to tantalize viewers that Zev might not be the one who he seems to be, a shot of a shower nozzle from Zev’s subjective angle might suggest a harrowing past promptly but in second-guessing, considering those victims have nearly zero-chance to get out of the gas chamber alive, how come Zev retain such recollections? More urgently, during the tension-mounting encounter with a Neo-Nazi US state trooper John Kurlander (Morris), the son of the third possible perpetrator, an astringent commentary of the tenacious vestige of Fascism that still detrimentally scorches our earth, Zev’s adeptness with sidearms simply doesn’t wash with his prior gun-novice comportment. Eventually, everything falls into the right place consummated with a clinical bang after Zev finally utters “I remember!”, once an executioner, always an executioner.
One might argue from the medical angle that how various ways of memory loss can effect Zev’s retention to an extent that he could be subjected to completely brainwash by instilled disinformation, and the film clearly doesn’t wish to dwell on that touchy issue. Nevertheless, as a fictitious creation, REMEMBER is visually unadorned but felicitously thought-provoking (the ingenuousness of the word “Nazi” from a poppet’s mouth bespeaks a genuine wish of a future where such enormities have no place to reside). Much obliged to a hale Plummer’s profoundly affecting and palpitatingly lived-in commitment (and a wondrous pianist too), it bootstraps itself into a lucid, pungent, reflective critique of the indelible ramifications of the egregious, man-made horror, even whose witnesses and survivors will soon ineluctably perish in process of time, that no one ever ought to forget.
referential entries: Egoyan’s CHLOE (2009, 6.9/10); Christian Petzold’s PHOENIX (2014, 7.8/10).
