Memento

Polaroids, tattooed memos and memory loss - Christopher Nolan's witty, fragmented tale of violent double-cross probes the deepest recesses of the psyche, says Peter Bradshaw

Christopher Nolan's first film, Following, was an elusive thriller which for all its faults effected a strange tentacular growth in the mind. Even now, I find myself selling it to people in conversation - particularly Nolan's philosopher-burglar, a connoisseur of London's empty spaces, addicted to the transgressive thrill of trespassing on other people's intimate lives. In time, I'm sure Following will come to be seen as an occult classic about the capital city, to be compared with work by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair.

1. Memento
2. Production year: 2000
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 113 mins
6. Directors: Christopher Nolan
7. Cast: Carrie-Anne Moss, Guy Pearce, Joe Pantoliano

Now Nolan has gone to Hollywood and the result is a glossier, flashier follow-up, Memento, starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss. It is a film to induce exhilaration along with a tiny, acute stab of regret. The regret is that, while the melancholy search for a British movie renaissance continues, the most natural young movie talent this country has produced in ages evidently finds American to be his natural cinematic language. But the exhilaration is that his film is terrific: exciting, demanding, agile, sly, witty and fun. Bobbing and weaving for 112 minutes, it is a film which somehow manages to keep you off balance and on your toes.
If Oliver Sacks wanted to write something in the style of Raymond Chandler, maybe Memento would be it: a complex thriller about time, memory and identity. Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a guy who wakes up every morning without knowing where he is, or why he's there. This is because of a mental condition caused by being hit on the head by an intruder. Now Leonard has become obsessed with his mission to catch this man who - as he repeatedly explains to anyone who will listen - raped and murdered his wife.
But he now has a short-term memory loss problem, meaning that although he can remember everything from before he lost his wife, now, after every 15 minutes, everything is wiped out. So Leonard has to take polaroids of key people that he meets, and vital facts have to be agonisingly tattooed on his body in case he loses handwritten notes. These shuffled photos and bizarre corporeal messages become Leonard's grotesque simulacrum of existence.
"How am I supposed to feel, when I can't feel time?" Leonard moans. And, correspondingly, how is Christopher Nolan going to construct a thriller without the continuous thread of time and memory to slot its constituent scenes together? That he is able to do so, daringly abolishing normal narrative rules, is proof of a precocious imagination and technical facility. Nolan's seductive disruptions of story order recall Tarantino, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, the puzzles of Nic Roeg, and the semi-amnesiac trope is familiar from Tom Tykwer's Wintersleepers. But Nolan's deployment of these structural devices is enjoyably distinctive.
The key motif is the wound: Leonard begins the movie with two nasty and mysterious scratch marks on his left cheek; in successive scenes these are shown in random stages of bloom, like the Polaroids Leonard takes. And when Leonard meets the beautiful and enigmatic Natalie (Moss), a bartender and girlfriend of a local drug-dealer, she too is sporting a livid welt to the cheek and a split lip.
"How have they got these marks?" is the question - and the answer comes in fragments, a jumbled tale of violence and double-cross. (It reminded me of an episode in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, The Schizoid Man, when No 6 has to work out how long he's been unconscious from the condition of a bruise on his fingernail.) Like a creepy kaleidoscope, each nudge and twist seems to jolt the disordered pieces into a new pattern.
Leonard's friends are also his tormentors. They claim to be helping him, but are they just using the poor muddled dupe to advance their own nefarious ends? It is not merely Natalie that Leonard has to worry about: there is also the deeply sinister Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), a chipper guy who appears to want nothing more than to help. Wherever Leonard is, whatever stage the narrative is at, whatever state his cheek-wound is in, the grinning Teddy is there, trying to help him find his wife's assailant. It is an excellent performance from Pantoliano, who attains a hideous, Mephistophelean potency.
There's a twist in the tail, obviously; in fact a mighty lash in the tail, which somehow manages to be more shocking and upsetting for emerging from this weird, fractured puzzle. Memento is a film high on thrills and high on IQ - an impressive new step in the career of this heavyweight director.