A movie easy to admire but difficult to like!

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2003)

Anyone who is fond of detective films will eager to watch "Memento". Besides, at first sight, Christopher Nolan's movie is alluring thanks to the story. Indeed, the story of the movie is worthy of any detective film and this is the kind of story that several directors who are past masters in suspense (Hitchcock of course) wouldn't repudiate at all.
This is the story of a man Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) which the woman has been killed. You can guess it easily: his first intention is to track down the killer back and it's not an easy job. It's all the more difficult as he's got a big problem: he suffers from amnesia. Will he succeed in tracking down the murderer?
But this is where things are getting difficult: the story is told upside down! At the beginning of the movie we know the murderer and during the movie we must discover his motive. But with such a device, it's very difficult to follow the story because it obeys a logic that is completely unusual in a movie. And this logic is likely to slip the spectator's attention. It happened with me.
In 1997, when U2 launched their album "Pop", "Rolling Stone" said that it was an album easy to admire but difficult to appreciate. The same critic could be said for "Memento". It remains an original movie but it also demands a big intellectual effort and it's perhaps due to this that the movie was a relative commercial failure. Nonetheless, congratulations to Christopher Nolan who managed to make such a movie that exploits very well recurring themas in detective films. For example, amnesia.