Memory Box – first-look review | Little White Lies

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Mem­o­ry Box – first-look review

01 Mar 2021

Words by Adam Woodward

A young woman with curly dark hair looking concerned, sitting at a desk with books and stationery in a colourful, cosy room.
A young woman with curly dark hair looking concerned, sitting at a desk with books and stationery in a colourful, cosy room.
Three women learn to rec­on­cile the past in this mov­ing dra­ma from Joana Had­jithomas and Khalil Joreige.

Freely adapt­ed from direc­tor Joana Had­jithomas’ account of com­ing of age in 1980s Beirut, this affect­ing dra­ma tack­les inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma while espous­ing the val­ue of pre­serv­ing the past for future gen­er­a­tions. In present day Mon­tréal, three women, Téta (Clé­mence Sab­bagh), daugh­ter Maia (Rim Turkhi) and grand­daugh­ter Alex (Palo­ma Vau­thi­er), gath­er amid a bliz­zard to cel­e­brate Christ­mas. It’s clear they share a close bond and yet there seems to be some­thing between them, a feel­ing com­pound­ed by the arrival of a mys­te­ri­ous package.

The box in ques­tion is filled with note­books, pho­tographs and cas­sette tapes which a young Maia sent to her (now deceased) pen pal in France dur­ing the Lebanese Civ­il War. At first Téta attempts to con­ceal it, insist­ing that no good can come from rak­ing over the coals of such a tumul­tuous and ulti­mate­ly painful time. But Alex, curi­ous to dis­cov­er more about her fam­i­ly his­to­ry, grad­u­al­ly begins piec­ing the past back togeth­er. Her moth­er is ini­tial­ly dis­mayed at this inva­sion of pri­va­cy, but open­ing the box proves to be cathar­tic for all three women.

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The thing about mem­o­ries is that they are not only high­ly sub­jec­tive but also non-trans­ferrable. Had­jithomas and co-direc­tor Khalil Joreige’s rather nifty way around this is to bring this trea­sure trove of memen­toes to life using a range of inven­tive and dynam­ic edit­ing tech­niques. Ani­mat­ed col­lage sequences, sound­tracked to such ​’80s elec­tropop ear­worms as Visage’s ​‘Fade to Grey’, are inter­spersed with more con­ven­tion­al flash­backs to cre­ate an evoca­tive patch­work of vignettes, reveal­ing inti­mate details of Maia’s ado­les­cence as well as the wider nation­al conflict.

We live in a visu­al age where images car­ry greater cur­ren­cy than ever before and yet at the same time are becom­ing increas­ing­ly deval­ued in a cul­tur­al sense. The point of Mem­o­ry Box is not to decry the loss of ana­logue tech­nolo­gies or the fact that hand­writ­ten let­ters are now seen as an out­mod­ed form of cor­re­spon­dence. An open­ing mon­tage of smart­phone footage shows that the mod­ern tools Alex relies on to com­mu­ni­cate with her friends are just as valid as the ones her moth­er used. Rather, this is a film about how per­son­al expe­ri­ences inform a col­lec­tive truth.

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