The Memory Thief

Deeply disturbing and thought provoking, well-acted if not without serious flaws, this indie film asks some serious questions about our relationship to the suffering of others.

Lukas, a young socially disconnected toll-booth clerk who lives in a sort of haze meets a holocaust survivor and becomes obsessed with the man, and then the subject itself. He begins working for a group recording survivor testimony.

Ever more unhinged Lukas becomes driven to watch and recording the testimony, filling up his own empty life with the horrifying memories of others. He starts to call himself a Jew, watches the tapes 24/7 and becomes increasingly delusional.

Ultimately, this borrows a bit too heavily from other films of lost souls becoming increasingly mad; Taxi Driver, The Believer, etc. as well as some cliché concepts of 'going crazy' behavior. (Does every crazy person tape hundreds of images to their walls?)

It also relies too much on hard to believe behavior by others. (e.g. the attraction the healthy, bright doctor-daughter daughter of the 1st survivor to the blatantly unstable Lukas is very hard to buy, as is the idea Lukas keeps his job long when he starts video-taping every car that passes by, asking the occupants 'are you a Jew'?).

But this has it's own understated nightmare quality, which makes it, like a train wreck, compulsively watchable. Which, in turn implicates the viewer in the same kind of obsession with the suffering of others the main character thrives on.

It also, only partly successfully, attacks Hollywood for trivializing the Holocaust in blockbusters like 'Shindler's List', although it doesn't make it clear why 'The Memory Thief' is really any different (in fact I felt queasy about the use of real survivor testimony in a film that's more a tale of madness than history).

None-the-less, I was always pulled in by the film, and quite haunted by it. Something I can say about far too few films.

A young man, who doesn't appear to have much of a life, whose mother is seriously ill, works as a toll-booth collector but is not that great at it, by some circumstances, become obsessed with the Jewish faith and the Holocaust and gets deeply involved in documenting testimony from Jews concentration camps survivors, with mixed results. His involvement with the daughter of one of the survivors is interesting and brought life to the script, and the revelations of the survivors, many of them actual (real) survivors, was very effective. Some have called this film a "psychological thriller," but I would not go that far. I found the film interesting. Not that good, but not that bad either. Just satisfactory. I am glad I saw it, but I would not recommend it to anyone, saying, "Hey, you have to watch this movie (The Memory Thief) it is really good." because, to me, it wasn't.

I am in favor of all takes and discussion of what I agree with Arthur Miller called the single most important thing to try and understand about the 20th century. This story is, on the surface, a character study of a descent into madness, although without any back-story to the main character, a lot is asked of the audience to follow him down the rabbit hole. The more effective exploration is perhaps the subjects of history and memory that are argued by the various characters our 'protagonist' encounters.

The authors of the film may maintain that their story's ending is deliberately undefined (there is no Commentary on the DVD), but I usually get the feeling in cases like this that they boxed themselves into a corner they couldn't find a way out of - and perhaps that's also the reason for the lack of a history for Lukas. That said, it is an extraordinary film, and I intend to read the book it was based on.

Lucas has no past or memories. So He starts obsessing with the Holocaust. He begins by doing some research about it, then takes a second job at a Holocaust Museum. He witnesses interviews with survivors. Then he totally immerses himself in the Holocaust and in a way, becomes a survivor himself. An interesting and disturbing little film. Very well written, acted, and edited. Not for everyone, that's for sure.

Time and tide wait no man.

Lesser and lesser number of witnessing the history-in-making are around since the WWII ended.

Remembering the past helps making fewer mistakes in the future-theoretically.

Holocaust, Jewish shoan is a lesson for all humankind.

Denying existence of this tragedy is a crime in civilized world.

Denying existence of this tragedy is a practice in terror-infested parts of the world.

New times bring new approaches to keeping memory of this crime against humanity alive.

Modern audio-video techniques are a tool to memorize materialized horror of survivors.

A mother-loving home-boy young Christian man involved in activities of a local Holocaust Society to make a video archive of memories shared by aged Holocaust victims.

A pressure of the heard transformed him in the Jew of then Nazi-occupied Europe with dare personal consequences in modern California, US.

Understanding the best of movie makers' intentions hardly avoids ambiguity of their de facto conclusions such psycho-pressure hyperbolised has lead factually to.