“This is a very instinctual part for me. When your whole life has been survival instinct, you can’t really be led with logical thought,” says Memory star Jessica Chastain. “It’s fight or flight energy all the time.”
Chastain, speaking during a virtual press conference with Memory writer/director Michel Franco and co-star Peter Sarsgaard, plays a survivor on the hunt for closure. Her character, Sylvia, is a recovering alcoholic and she hides the roots of her addiction deep within her memory bank. A high school reunion makes old wounds resurface when Saul (Sarsgaard) sits down at her table. Without a word, Sylvia abruptly leaves the party. Saul, however, follows her home with an entranced smirk. Without a word passing between the two, Memory leaves an unsettling feeling that illustrates Sylvia’s fight of flight impulse.
For Franco, Memory continues his cinema of discomfort after his 2020 prizewinner New Order. But the film gradually reveals a surprisingly sweeter side to his oeuvre once Sylvia and Saul confront the past. “I wanted to make a film about broken people, about two characters who are not supposed to have an additional shot at love or anything in life,” says Franco. “Two people that society is telling to just stay quiet and retire from life.”
Telling an Authentic Story
Chastain says the appeal of playing Sylvia was the complexity and absence of clichés in telling the story of a recovering addict and sexual assault survivor. “I loved that Sylvia felt like an authentic human being, a person who was making very complicated decisions and not always responsible with how she led her life,” observes Chastain. “Something that I latched onto when I was shooting was the idea of her daughter and the connection they have. It helps to almost keep her alive.” Chastain says that working with young actor Brooke Timber, who plays Sylvia’s daughter Anna, gave a point of connection. Despite Sylvia’s troubles, and her habit of distrusting everyone in her life (note the number of locks on her doors), she strives to be a better parent than her mother (Jessica Harper) was to her.
Sarsgaard admits that the early scenes in which Saul trails Sylvia home were among the most challenging. Playing a character with dementia, Sarsgaard explains that Saul couldn’t reveal himself to the audience. “There’s a story point there that I need to make work as an actor. The audience thinks one thing about me that is not true and you don’t want to act out of character just to satisfy the plot and story,” notes Sarsgaard. “But I wanted the part to be joyful from the beginning.” While Saul seems like a total creep from Sylvia’s point of view, Sarsgaard plays him as a gentle romantic. “I wanted this to be a story about a man who has a condition and not a man who is his condition.”
The Showdown
Both Sylvia and Saul’s secrets explode in a riveting scene that forms Memory’s centerpiece. Sylvia leads Saul into the woods and sits him down on a log. In a bravura feat of acting that defies the expected tête-à-tête, Sylvia confronts Saul with hopes to trigger his memory. She tells him that he was among the boys who sexually assaulted her during high school. Saul, however, responds with a blank stare. He legitimately seems to have no recollection of these events.
“I, as Sylvia, I’m sure as Jessica, was so excited to do that scene,” recalls Chastain. “I felt powerful, like, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this moment and I’m going to kill him.’ I had this energy like a cat playing with the mouse.”
However, the absence of explosive drama makes the confrontation so jarringly effective. Sylvia wants a fight and Saul can’t give it to her. Franco accentuates this tension with a long take that holds both actors on either side of the frame as Sylvia tries to make Saul squirm.
“We don’t over-rehearse anything with Michel—he captures it all for the first time on camera,” explains Chastain. “The beautiful way that Peter responded in that scene was that he didn’t match my energy. Part of chemistry is when two people are holding onto different rhythms or different energies and they don’t match each other, so there’s tension in the difference. He was so calm, so sweet, so confused. He was so the opposite of what Sylvia expected. She wanted to fight. She was ready to draw blood.” Chastain says she felt the axis of power shift between the characters. By the end of the scene, she recalls hot tears rolling down her face and feeling as if Sylvia had lost.
On Trust and Chemistry
“The wonderful thing about the way Michel works is that he doesn’t cover a scene,” adds Chastain. “He figures out where should the camera be and it could move from take to take. He doesn’t really worry about continuity because we’re not matching anything. Each scene is basically one take. When you have more than one actor in the frame, you can surprise each other.”
Sarsgaard, who won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his performance, says that he approached that scene like a romantic one. For Saul, being led into the woods by a beautiful woman he admires offers a chance for connection. But Sylvia’s aggressive response leaves him shocked. “By the end of the scene I say, ‘What do I know about myself?’” reflects Sarsgaard. “Maybe I’m not me. It could have been the reason I didn’t match her with anger. I’m in a place in my life [as Saul] where anything could be true, anything is possible.”
He echoes Chastain’s thoughts on his chemistry and says Memory often unfolded as the actors listened to one another and responded accordingly. “Chemistry is something that exists because we are both open to listening. It’s just this happening back and forth,” he says, signalling their synergy with his hand. “You can’t really create that. If someone is not in tune with that, it’s not going to happen.”
Representing Dementia and Addiction
The actor adds that he drew upon experiences of seeing his uncle slip away with dementia to explore Saul’s responses. “The dementia is just the condition. It’s the obstacle that’s in the way of him getting what he wants,” says Sarsgaard. “A big part of his struggle was the way that the people around him were reacting to the diagnosis.” Saul’s family is overprotective of him similar to how Sylvia overly shields Anna from the world. As the love story develops between Saul and Sylvia, it equally becomes a drama about their right to assert their own agency.
Meanwhile, Chastain gives one of the best portraits of a recovering addict on film. Memory roots Sylvia’s recovery in reality as the film opens with Chastain attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Real survivors share their stories as Sylvia listens empathetically. Chastain says she had no idea that was Franco’s plan for the scene until she arrived at the location. “You have to not look like the actor in the scene when everyone else is exposing this rawness and this vulnerability and this humanity,” she observes.
“You don’t want to be faking it, so how can you dig really deep into yourself and make it as real as possible for you as well? That’s how the whole film was for me in every aspect, not just the AA, but also where Sylvia works,” adds Chastain, whose character is a social worker. “That was an actual home where the residents lived. I was serving them lunch and the camera would go around and catch moments of me interacting and working there.”
A Sobering Portrait
Franco adds that everyone at the AA meeting agreed to be on camera and that he drew from experience to build Sylvia’s story. “They’re survivors, and I have a big deal of respect for them,” says Franco. The director notes that he opens Memory with an anniversary scene having attending similar milestones in recovery for other people in his life.
“The broken people that you see every day here and there, we never know half of what people are going through.”
