In the much beloved Charlie Kaufman-penned film, "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," a pair of grieving former lovers pay to undergo a process whereby the memories of each other will be completely wiped clean from their consciousness. Essentially, the film asks the question if it's better to have loved and lost; or to have loved, and lost the entire experience altogether (unsurprisingly, the film strongly suggests the former).
In "Little Fish," Chad Hartigan's romantic drama, working from a contemplative screenplay by Mattson Tomlin, the trouble isn't in wanting to forget the love of your life, it's having their memory forcibly evicted from you against your will.
Set in contemporary Seattle, there's a new disorder called NIA (Neuro Inflammatory Affliction) circulating through the world -- yes, this is a film where you have to watch people wearing masks, fighting for clinical intervention, and suffering the effects of a widespread virus, be advised -- which causes those stricken to lose their memories, either very quickly, or over several months. NIA works as a sped-up kind of Alzheimer's, only one that affects the young as easily as the old.
In the midst of this pandemic, we get to know, via a rich, multi-fractured timeline, Emma (Olivia Cooke) and her husband, Jude (Jack O'Connell). Very much in love, they are terrified when it becomes clear Jude has been afflicted. He begins by forgetting smaller things, work details with his photography business, friend's names, conversations he and Emma recently had, but soon enough, he's losing the thread of their shared history (going off a medical checklist, Emma asks him continually who she is, how old she may be, and her favorite color).
In desperation, she enters him into an experimental protocol for a surgical procedure that turns out to have a much better than expected efficacy, but when his initial acceptance gets rejected, Jude asks Emma, a vet, to perform the procedure herself instead, based on some youtube videos a doctor has posted.
The plot of the film, almost by definition, is ambulatory, shuffling around from one moment to the next, moving via various timeline flashbacks through their lives together, how they met, and what they experienced, in and out of chronological order. This gives the film a malleable sort of shape, allowing it to jump forward and back at its own pace, and in the order that best makes emotional sense for the couple.
It's an effective, if elusive frame, working, as actual memory often does, in small jags of experience and sense-reflection, allowing us enough of a window into their relationship to well understand the fear of loss they both experience.
Given the fractured nature of the narrative, we have to rely largely on the chemistry of Emma and Jude to have it make sense, and, in this, Cooke and O'Connell are both very strong, bringing depth to their characters even in the small, imbalanced scenes they share together. The sense of kinship, even as one of them begins to slip away, is palpable.
As with "Eternal Sunshine," the film works as a wrenching analog for love itself, a series of fleeting moments between people, captured haphazardly by delicate neurons and transferred to our cerebral cortex, whose composure and elasticity allow for constant shaping and re-shaping of the details to suit our mood.
It wasn't planned, of course, but it also strikes a pretty deep chord with our present day viral malaise, where people are still getting sick in record numbers, hospitals are swamped, and loved ones are suddenly vanishing out of existence, faster than we can even begin to process their loss. We might very well choose to hang onto our memories of each other, no matter how painful, but that's not to say we don't pay a heavy price for the privilege.
‘Little Fish’
87 Cast: Olivia Cooke, Jack O’Connell, Raúl Castillo, Soko
Director: Chad Hartigan
Rating: Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes
Playing theatrically.
February 05, 2021 at 02:53PM
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/feb/05/forget-me-not/
Forget me not - Arkansas Online
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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