‘The Eternal Memory’ Review: A Love That Lasts When Recollections Fade

The phrase “Alzheimer’s” isn’t spoken till effectively into “The Eternal Memory.” While that could be as a result of this documentary’s topics hardly ever point out it themselves, withholding the prognosis additionally looks as if a deliberate selection by the director, Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”).

An uncannily intimate portrait of a pair adapting their relationship to a illness that impacts the thoughts, “The Eternal Memory” doesn’t goal to carry spectators’ fingers. Like Paulina Urrutia, whose husband, Augusto Góngora, is the one with Alzheimer’s, the viewer should frequently reassess Góngora’s lucidity, which for lengthy stretches is hardly doubtful. Part of Urrutia’s technique is to softly quiz him about their lives. Does he keep in mind their first date? Was it at one in every of their houses? (The right reply is not any: Neither can cook dinner.)

Góngora — who died in May, after the movie was accomplished and first proven — was a TV journalist in Chile who participated in underground newscasts in the course of the Pinochet dictatorship. Urrutia is an actress who served as tradition minister in the course of the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s first time period. Their occupations add one other layer of reflexivity: In other ways, each have been concerned in telling different folks’s tales and preserving the nationwide reminiscence.

Urrutia, who’s proven taking up the capturing of the documentary as soon as the pandemic necessitated isolation, is sort of surreally unflappable; she is never seen shedding endurance with Góngora, though there’s a heart-rending scene during which she informs him that he has gone a complete morning with out recognizing her. Could any movie utterly seize such a non-public dynamic? Surely not, however at moments, “The Eternal Memory” seems to return shut.

The Eternal Memory
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.