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Rating: There are things in life that must be preserved, protected from vandals, cared for when chipped by the offenses of time, and handed down. They are memory. Memory.
I like this word; I also adore its Greek root, mimnesko, a verb with a twisted pronunciation, because sometimes the paths of memory are tortuous. Difficult; to remember, one must make an effort. To forget requires nothing. You will forgive the premise, but, as they say, it serves to frame the theme.
The film in question, released a few years ago, is a story of memories through images and written words. It tells of a mother, and a daughter who recalls her ordeal through the days marked by her illness. That illness with many names and no name, which the doctors of the mind believe they know in its deepest mechanisms and most violent accesses. And yet, even today, it remains a question mark. Where it comes from, how it is generated, how it can be cured.
Memories, then, just memories of a little girl who sees the flower of maternal beauty and sweetness disfigured. And regrets, those of the girl made woman who asks whoever dispenses that disease with random precision – random precision said Waters about a crazy diamond – to have just one hour. Just one hour to say words never spoken, linger with her gaze on her eyes, known instead through meticulous yet indecipherable, oracular medical reports all different and all the same, chronicle of a dark evil that was then relegated to cemeteries of the soul and, now that these are closed (memories themselves), forgotten by all, confined within the walls of homes of those who "have the misfortune in the house" and do not know, do not want, cannot ask for help. Waiting for the day, "that" day. Hoping, pleading in moments of deepest despair, that it will come soon, soon, soon...
Alina's mother died by suicide; it happened to many at the time, often it was the only liberation one could afford from the tortures inflicted by a psychiatry as impotent as it was sadistic.
It still happens today. Perhaps even more so. Without clamor, or flights into the void. Today, electroshock is no longer given; today, people are dimmed with "new generation" neuroleptics. Those that destroy every form of will and that, to cure the effect, kill the organ that produces it. The brain. The house of memories.
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
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