‘Memory’: Read The Screenplay For Michel Franco’s Thoughtful Drama Starring Jessica Chastain & Peter Sarsgaard

Nancy Tartaglione
·2 min read
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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Michel Franco’s Memory, the thoughtful drama that won Peter Sarsgaard the Best Actor Volpi Cup in Venice earlier this year. Franco directs and wrote the movie that also stars Jessica Chastain.

The latter plays Sylvia, a social worker who leads a simple and structured life: her daughter, her job, her AA meetings. This is blown open when Saul (Sarsgaard), who suffers from bouts of dementia, follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past.

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In Venice, Franco told the press corps, “My biggest fear is losing my mind, which is what brought me to (the subject of) dementia. If you don’t know who you are, are you still yourself? It triggers many questions for a scriptwriter.”

Chastain said she was taken by the Memory script and “how it was absent of any cliché. I was so moved at the story of this woman who had led the trauma in her life in front of her… and it closed her off to the world. In essence, she stopped living. How beautiful to watch this journey of her learning to live again.”

In her review for Deadline, Stephanie Bunbury wrote of Memory, “It is all exactly right in the writing but also in the performances; there is thoughtfulness behind all of it.”

Of Franco, she said, “His scalpel never misses.”

Memory is produced by  Eréndira Núñez Larios, Franco, Duncan Montgomery and Alex Orlovsky. Ketchup Entertainment will kick off limited domestic release December 22 before going wide January 5.

Click below to read the script.

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