MEMENTO (2000)
Leonard is an insurance investigator whose memory has been damaged following a head injury he sustained after intervening on his wife's murder. His quality of life has been severely hampered after this event, and he can now only live a comprehendible life by tattooing notes on himself and taking pictures of things with a Polaroid camera. The movie is told in forward flashes of events that are to come that compensate for his unreliable memory, during which he has liaisons with various complex characters. Leonard badly wants revenge for his wife's murder, but, as numerous characters explain, there may be little point if he won't remember it in order to provide closure for him. The movie veers between these future occurrences and a telephone conversation Leonard is having in his motel room in which he compares his current state to that of a client whose claim he once dealt with.
The movie starts with a murder - a revenge killing, in fact. But was the right person killed?
Leonard is a man with no short-term memory. He hasn't been able to form new memories since the night his wife was murdered. Now he's on a hunt to find the murderer but with no way of remembering names, dates, places, facts and faces. He tattoos himself with mementos of his search. When someone knows him, he checks the Polaroids which he keeps to see if he knows them. Does he like this person? Does he trust this person? Is this the killer? He doesn't know unless he's scribbled a note. Smile took the polaroids from this film and changed the meaning of them to suit their character instead of using them as a means of memory that he needs, he uses them as a memory their antagonist wants, they are keep sakes in the same means of memento.
You live the story in reverse order so that you never know more than Leonard does, I think this is a great way to keep the audience involved in the film, I really like the ideas of the audience never knowing more than the character, it sets equality. In one scene you see Leonard getting information from a person who knows him - maybe a good person; maybe bad. In the next scene you see a previous meeting between the two which sheds more light on their relationship. Later still you see how they met. But is that all of the story? You've yet to find out... and you won't know everything until the last scene. By living it backwards, you, like Leonard, have no knowledge of what came before.
It's brilliant story telling. But you might get frustrated because you don't know what's going on. In fact, that's the whole idea, which I love.
This film will leave its own memento on your mind, and you'll have a hard time forgetting how much you enjoyed it.
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