Remember

Decades pass, monumental changes revitalize cultures and nations are reborn, but the past still haunts survivors with an unrelenting immediacy which cannot be forgotten, forgiven, Auschwitz's legacy, rationalized perpetual vengeance.

Atom Egoyan's Remember sombrely examines such a mindset through a series of alarming encounters which thoughtfully comment on differing degrees of punishment.

Much stronger than The Captive or Devil's Knot.

A holocaust survivor, Zev Gutman (Christopher Plummer), the last person alive who can identify a Nazi war criminal, begins a solemn journey to find him, guided by a compatriot who's too infirm to travel.

When you consider the relationship between Gutman's health and his mission, his mission itself seems profound yet reckless, he can't even remember what he's doing whenever he wakes up, obsessive testaments, pure uncompromising revenge.

The film viscerally questions Gutman's quest, apart from one sequence where a contemporary Nazi is confronted, by integrating lives lived and lost, the present, the world that bloomed after World War II's devastation ended, notably in the final scene where the oppressor is caught ensconced in his familial bower.

Daughter and granddaughter witnessing.

He could have been tried, sentenced, flushed out by an organization dedicated to convicting war criminals.

Absolutely punishing the guilty in front of the innocent through murder 70 years after they mindlessly followed totalitarian commands is not the way to move progressively forward.

Such acts ensure the perseverance of vengeance perpetually.

Remember cautiously yet capably constructs this idea.

Perhaps Kurlander (Jürgen Prochnow) wasn't mindlessly following orders, he could have been one of the psychotics, but his family remains guiltless in the film, unaware of the horrors he once unleashed.

Volatile subject matter skilfully postulated.

With the best twist I've seen in awhile.

Haunting in its drive.

Provocative.

The Hour of the Wolf

Finished my second viewing of Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf today and decided to read it platonically. In the end, artist Johan Borg loses his battle with insanity, his demons steadfastly claiming his reason. Borg is living upon an island where his imagination has conjured up a band of puerile aristocrats with nothing better to do than torture one another and whomever they happen to encounter. In years past, Borg had a sultry affair with one Veronica Volger, within which the passionate participants had to keep things hushed up to avoid arousing public shock and condemnation. Borg's desire for this icon of pleasure, the-worst-possible-treatment for his sanity, the best for his art, fuels his artistic integrity while ruining his drive. Eventually, Borg murders the living creating child within (whose vibrant presence inspires his texts) and confronts his appetite for Veronica within his manufactured hallucination. The aristocrats, functioning as perverted reason, cheer him on, producing an abject audience, reveling in their abomination, utterly humiliating Johan (platonically, passion united with the appetites leads to the flaking of wisdom). Afterwards, defenseless, his reason having abandoned him, he travels to the woods to perish, amongst the flowers and the fauna, the streams and the breeze.

Listen closely and you'll hear them coming, if you have any talent, any off-beat goals that you know you can achieve while they continually attempt to break your confidence. Just try not to hear what they say, crush the headaches, persevere.

Through the hour of the wolf.