Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: MEMORIZU [Tribeca Film Festival - New York, New York]
There is power in the repetition of routine. "Memorizu" [International Narrative Competition] as a film reflects the notion of loyalty and time in a reflective society. Directed by Miiku Sakanishi, the narrative follows a man caught between necessity and losing track of what family is. He has to travel away to take care of his father-in-law while his wife stays home and works for a travel agency along with taking care of their young daughter. The dual narrative shows her leading around older couples on vacation seeing where they lived their formative years. Meanwhile her husband Yuta (Tasuku Emoto) spends his days helping his ill father in law (her father) run his business in another part of the country. It is a learning curve for him realizing it is just about friendships and not necessarily about the work, though the work has to continue in order to live There is an organic functionality to the story with the wife taking their daughter to school before work and him finding routine walking the dog elsewhere in Japan.
"Memorizu" is a reflection of life passing by even when it is standing right there. It involves people looking back when they are happy when they actually should have been happy in the moment. The father-in-law owns a photo shop so we see life through the panes of window on his house and yet the beginning of the film shows the progression of time from a similar pane but one that also shows an ocean which also could be representative of time. But in the passage of time, there will always be losses. The representation of this is seen within the visage of a man that takes his cows to graze at a lunch spot near where Yuta stops every day. He waves at Yuta every time he stops until one day the man just isn’t there any more. As the film progresses, it becomes a blur of what the old man remembers and what Yuta might be experiencing. A collage of photos from slides towards the end of the film Yuta’s wife and daughter but not from when he remembers them. It also could be the lost memory of his wife’s mother. The idiom of memory is that all time flows together. “Memorizu” is an ode to that, not rushing but with a slow pace that understands looking at the world for how it is. B
By Tim Wassberg
