Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

Film noir died as a genre when audiences stopped wondering what was going to happen next. Heady concoctions of dark, everyman detectives, mysterious femmes fatale and labyrinthine plots of betrayal can only ever end up in one place. As a hand flicks a blood-stained Polaroid, a picture capturing a scene of violent death, Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ begins right there — at the logical end-point of an old hardboiled crime flick. As the colours drain from the picture, it leaps back into its camera, a bullet leaps back into a gun, and we are left wondering: we know what’s going to happen, but what the hell just happened?

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a man driven by an obsession — to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. Leonard, however, is not driven by logic or plans but by instinct — he has no short term memory, and must write everything down or he has no knowledge that it ever happened. Knowing only of his wife’s death because he has tattooed it across his chest, it is the first thing he sees every day as he looks in the mirror. With a system of notes and Polaroids, he constantly reminds himself of his purpose, and burns clues onto his flesh where they will never be lost. He does not question, he does only what his own notes tell him to do. The audience, along with him, travel backwards from the film’s brutal climax, moment by moment, with no knowledge of how Leonard arrived at that point.

The mysterious Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss — ‘The Matrix’) helps Leonard’s quest, because, the Polaroid says, she feels sympathy. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) seems at first to be Leonard’s sidekick, but perhaps he is playing the affliction to his own advantage — if somebody tells Leonard that they are friends, he (and the audience) can only assume that they are. All that is true is written down, and this must be trusted.

eMemento’ is a powerful exploration of the nature of identity, memory and perception. Nolan, in only his second film, takes the trick of playing out a film in reverse and makes it so much more than a painful gimmick. The delight of ‘Memento’ is not in who did it, or who gets killed in the end, but the chain of manipulation and deceit that turns a successful insurance investigator into an empty, vengeance-obsessed shell. The dynamite script, played out in scrawled notes and snatched snapshots, asks many more questions than it ever answers, but it expertly peels layer after layer from Leonard’s psyche, searching for the absolute truth his memory won’t let him have.

Pearce, whose Hollywood career post-eLA Confidential’ has been decidedly less stellar than co-star Russell Crowe’s, is presented with an enormous challenge in fleshing out the enigma of Shelby, but he handles it with stunning ease. Nobody ever expected Mike from ‘Neighbours’ to come this far, or to have the ability to own the screen with such raw power, yet this is truly the kind of role that should shoot him onto the A-list where he belongs. Moss, another superstar in the making, and Pantoliano, who has always been ethat other guy in that really good film’, do a fine job of playing Shelby’s tormentors and aides, never letting their characters stray too far into noir caricature.

The 29 year-old Nolan presented himself with a challenge in making this all stick together, yet it plays out impeccably. A sharp, edgy visual style belies great attention to detail, as insignificant gestures towards the story’s end take on devastating significance eearlier’ on. Its play with memory and obsession is reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’, only we know how it all finishes up. As the plot twists and turns in reverse, piled-up betrayals undo themselves, and the stack of Polaroids gets smaller, Shelby’s story still lurches into a kind of reverse self-destruction to which the audience, so riveted to his concept of truth, feel a certain identification.

It is not often that a film can do something genuinely new, particularly in such a moribund genre, but Memento is a surprising little treat. Just don’t let anybody tell you the beginning.