Memories Look at Me (2012, Song Fang) (Patreon)

35/100

DISCLAIMER: Because this film pretty much vanished following its stint on the fest circuit (and subsequent micro NYC “release”), I wound up watching a low-res...dupe, I guess you'd call it, which I'd had sitting around for eight years while waiting in vain for a better source. Not quite someone videotaping it in a theater—how I originally saw Sátántangó, incidentally!—but in that ballpark. Probably didn't make a huge difference, given that the Variety review notes "Digivid quality is never more than just adequate, and the pic would have been a lot more marketable if it had been shot and lit with proper equipment," but at least one friend (who I believe saw it projected at NYFF) praised Song's interior shots in which teeming life can apparently be seen through windows, serving as counterpoint to the determinedly sedate foreground, and that aspect was definitely lost on me. Then again, that's not the sort of thing I generally find captivating, and it almost certainly wouldn't have outweighed the crushing boredom inspired by Song's aggressive equanimity. (Oxymoron intended.) I’m still not sure whether Memories Look at Me is a documentary in which everyone studiously ignores the camera or a metafictional family/self-portrait, but it doesn't much matter—either way, the complete absence of any emotion stronger than mild ruefulness drove me up the wall. It's an entire movie of Setsuko Hara agreeing that life is disappointing, with a warm smile, except that in this case even "disappointing" is too strong—it's more like "Isn't life a succession of pleasures and disappointments, ending all too soon?" "Yes, it is." Over and over and over for nearly 90 minutes. Every once in a while, somebody says something of genuine interest, e.g. Song's mother explaining that she seemed older to Song than did the mothers of Song's school friends because all of those friends (like most Chinese kids at the time) were only children, whereas Song was born several years after her brother. Mostly, though, it's exactly as anodyne as I'd have expected of a movie made by the woman Song plays in Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, of which she is far and away my least favorite element. Her latest feature (which I'll also eventually have to see, as it, too, was Main Slated by NYFF) is called The Calming. Yikes.