On demand: "The Eternal Memory"

The Chilean documentarist Maite Alberdi has set out her stall as a chronicler of oldtimers. She earned an Oscar nomination for 2020's The Mole Agent, a broadly genial, bittersweet crowdpleaser about life in a retirement home; now she's been entrusted with some rapidly fading memories. The Eternal Memory is framed as a profile of a couple who've been together for 25 years: the sometime current affairs journalist and author Augusto Góngora and the actress and former culture minister Paulina Urrutia. Collectively, they are a model of devotion, but the sixtysomething Augusto has Alzheimer's, which means he sometimes wakes up in the morning with no knowledge of who the woman next to him is, and can often be observed in a childlike state belying his grey hair: distractible, muttering to himself, needing to be led around by the hand. This is, however, what Paulina does, along with gently reminding her man who she is, where the pair are and what they're doing there; during the first half of the film, she's seen including him in rehearsals for her latest stage production. This is a woman finding ways to fill the growing voids in her beloved's head, reassuring Augusto he still has reasons to live and people who need him, even as the mass mindscrambler of Covid blows into town at the onset of 2020. What Alberdi set out to film here - and what she captures, rather beautifully - are those intangibles somebody has to turn a camera on to remind us what they look like: love, care, infinite patience.

In the spirit of such patience, permit me to add a caveat or two to that last, glowing sentence. Augusto and Paulina are visibly of a generation who did very well for themselves - so well, indeed, that they were able to build a house, a family and a life together. (Home videos of the pair's travels add texture and contrast to the largely housebound present.) There is a sense, through most of The Eternal Memory's opening hour, that Alberdi is filming an ideal of sorts: to have enough money set aside for the end of your life so as to keep the roof of your dream house over your head, and to negotiate any mental or physical deterioration in comparative comfort; to have the time to sit down and fully brief a partner who is ever so slowly losing their bearings. (In most Alzheimer's cases, you will be aware, it is a lot more difficult than this.) For a while, I wondered how Alberdi was getting access to such intimate and/or upsetting scenes, but then I remembered that Augusto was a TV news reporter in his younger days, and that some form of muscle memory - a relative ease around cameras - must have kicked in. Certainly, even this deep into Augusto's dotage, the sharp analytical mind we observe broadcasting live to the nation in the film's archive clips seems to allow him some awareness, fumbling and fleeting though it is, of his own sorry condition: when he's switched on, he's absolutely ready to roll.

Alberdi is upfront about her subjects' privilege, but her real masterstroke here is to connect Augusto's plight to a wider historical idea of memory. In those archive clips, we see Augusto reporting on the brutalities and crimes of the Pinochet regime, and pledging to report back on the fates of those the dictator disappeared. (He stands for that leftist old guard who spent the back end of the 20th century vowing never to forget.) To her credit, Alberdi pursues this parallel with characteristic sensitivity; she knows that just because Augusto has more to remember (and thus more to forget) than, say, your uncle Stan, it doesn't make his Alzheimer's any more tragic. But - boy - do we get a sense of the tragedy it is whenever this camera alights upon its helplessly confused male subject wandering the halls after midnight, holding court with the spectres inside his own head. That Augusto and Paulina seem so well-matched, even in this winter of their lives, struck me as inextricably bound with her vocation as an actress: here is a woman trained to articulate deep-rooted doubts and fears, and to both respond to and improvise around her partner in any given scenario. (Augusto, for his part, often appears to be playing several roles at once, and can no longer be relied upon to memorise the right lines.) Yet in moments such as the one described above, there is only so much a loved one can do, and only so much a filmmaker can do to dress it up. I had issues with some of the staging in The Mole Agent, which felt cutesy if not completely contrived, but in The Eternal Memory Alberdi does exactly what the best journalists do: acknowledge the emotions in play, while giving the facts to us straight. Sit tight through the end credits for a late-breaking headline.

The Eternal Memory is available to rent via Dogwoof on Demand.