Director: Maite Alberdi (Chile, USA). Year of Release: 2023
An ageing man and a slightly younger woman are sitting on a bad. She asks him to introduce himself. At first you think they are being a little too precious and performing to the cameras. As she gets him to say that he is Augusto, she is Paulina and that they are married it’s like drawing teeth. As the film goes on, you realise that Augusto Góngora, who was once a famous Leftist journalist, has contracted Alzheimers and really does experience sporadic phases of disorientation.
Paulina Urrutia, nearly 20 years Augusto’s junior, is herself a successful actor. Her husband affectionately calls her Pauli, and she often addresses him as Góngora. The couple is clearly very fond of each other, almost as fond as Augusto is of the books which line every wall of their house. In one of his distracted moments, Augusto bursts into tears as he worries that “they” are going to take his books from him. He does not look able to imagine a greater tragedy.
Góngora’s past is difficult to separate from that of his homeland. Following the CIA-backed Pinochet coup in 1973, he reported on the repression in Chile. We see him on camera asserting that despite the repression, “democracy, freedom, justice, and solidarity” are the soul of Chile. Although Urrutia was 4 when the coup happened, she also became politically active, especially in the actors’ union. In 2006, she was appointed minister of the National Council of Culture and the Arts.
It is both ironic and poignant that one of Góngora’s most important battles was to ensure that ordinary Chileans’ memories of the Pinochet dictatorship are not erased. We see him being interviewed saying that under Pinochet the dead were not allowed to be dead, as they were always missing or misidentified. Góngora’s book Chile: The Forbidden Memory was an attempt to address this problem, and a plea for a collective memory.
This means that the film is trying to do two things at the same time. We watch the gradual mental disintegration of Góngora while he fights to remember Chile’s brutal history. At times, these two aspects of the film clash with each other. While Góngora is trying to recall his past, he is shocked by the suddenly memory of children watching protestors being killed on the streets. The memories which he is trying to preserve are at times deeply painful to him.
As we see Augusto as a young reporter with dark hair and a moustache, reporting to camera, it is as if we are looking at a different person. Similarly, we meet Augusto and Pauli’s daughters, both in person and as young children in old family photographs. Keeping memory does not mean preserving everything in aspic. It means remembering the feelings we had in times of struggle and applying them to our later lives.
At one stage, Pauli invites her husband to join her in rehearsals. As she makes the speech which was written for her, he looks confused, asking “what’s going on here?” Pauli reads her lines, which remind us of her daily experiences at home: “My memories are in music. In my garden, everything around me takes me to the past. Tomorrow will be a memory,” Later Augusto takes the stage. As the actors stage their choreographed dance, he dances to his own tune, centre stage.
Pauli is the film’s unacknowledged star, an embodiment of stoicism as her husband loses his sense of self-control. We watch her watching him telling her that he’s not well, or screaming out in anguish: “I’m alone”. We witness Pauli’s struggles to preserve the memory of her husband who is diminishing in front of her, but we also know that she is the one who is going to be left on her own. This makes the scenes of the couple just stroking each other all the more tender.
Die unendliche Erinnerung shows the banal aspects of the everyday life of an ageing couple, while making the slightest acts seem profound. I can’t remember a film which has so successfully merged the personal and the political. It celebrates Augusto and Pauli’s contributions towards liberating the country while showing their mutual love. We know that we are watching people who have really made a difference, but their legacy comes from the impact they have on each other.
The film doesn’t shy away from issues of mortality. At one stage, Pauli asks Augusto if he wants to die. “No, I don’t want to die,” he replies. “I love life.” At one stage, she mentions his friend José Manuel Parada. Augusto learned about Parada’s murder by reading the news. Remembering life requires us to count the dead, to recount how they died and to name the people responsible. It is not in the remit of this film to do this explicitly, but we know who’s to blame.
The film’s message can be summarized in a note that Augusto wrote Pauli in the front of a book, a couple of months after they had started seeing each other: “There is pain here, the horrors are denounced, but there is also a lot of nobility. Memory is still forbidden, but this book is stubborn. Those who have memory, have courage, and are sowers, like you. You know about memory, you have courage, and are a sower.” What matters is what we are able to leave behind.
This is a film which demands your attention. There are not many car crashes. We watch Pauli shaving Augusto, lovingly, reading to him as they take a walk, or helping with his physical therapy. You probably need to be in a certain state of mind to benefit from it, but boy if you are ready for it, this is a film which is both moving and provocative. It depicts two people deeply in love with each other while never becomes cloying or sentimental. And there aren’t many films like that.
CinePhil 