Memories of Tomorrow

It's not the latest movie, it was on the screen in 2007 and it's one of my favorite film. Since I watched it on television again recently, I decide to introduce this touching film.

At first it’s a matter of a missed word, a forgotten name. Then he forgets how to drive a familiar route. The advertising executive keeps his worries to himself, but he can’t hide his problems, and eventually a doctor delivers a dread prognosis: Early- onset Alzheimer’s. He is only 49.

“Memories of Tomorrow” is a movie about the disease that is told from the sick person’s point of view, not that of family members. The subject of the film, Saeki, is a high-octane ad executive with a young and eager team, and as a perfectionist it depresses him to discover his own imperfections mounting. He forgets dates, times, business meetings. In one breathtaking scene, he gets lost in Tokyo’s urban maze and takes instructions from a secretary over his cell phone while literally running back to his office.

The character is played by Ken Watanabe and there is a personal element in his brave and painful performance. I learn from the Japan Times, he had been fighting leukemia. His Saeki is just as determined to fight Alzheimer’s, and is much aided by his patient and courageous wife Emiko (Kanako Higuchi), who writes notes naming everything in their house, prepares his daily schedule, and keeps up a brave front.

He holds on as long as he can, even accepting a lesser position and a smaller pension to stay with his company, but finally he must retire, and return to a home where now it is his wife who goes out every morning to earn a salary. He has better days and worse days, and a day fraught with fear when he must make a speech at his daughter’s wedding. He loses the text of his speech. “Just say anything,” his wife whispers. “I’m here for you.” She takes his hand.

She has the patience of a saint, but one day his wife snaps, telling him with cold anger what a distant husband he has been, and then he physically hurts her, how flawed, how cruel.The director handles this painful moment with great visual tact, not showing it but instead cutting to the sudden darting of fish in an aquarium.

There are moments of almost unbearable sadness, as in what he reveals to a nurse that he is the one who is coming to the nursing home at the end of a tour of a nursing home. And we observe the indifference of the company where he has been a salaryman all his life: Yes, thanks for your contribution, now go quietly, please, and don’t let the clients know. Some films on Alzheimer’s attempt to show an upside. I don’t think there is an upside somehow. I really love this film, I was so touching about the relationship between Saeki and his wife. (and I always moved to tears through almost the whole film! haha)




http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071129/REVIEWS/71129006