Institute History
Description
In the opening moments of Gabriele Muccino's Remember Me, the camera lingers on the Ristuccia family, asleep in their comfortable, middle-class apartment. But when the alarm buzzes seconds later, the tranquility of their comfortable lives is interrupted, and they spend the bulk of the film waking up to their own existential dilemmas.
Carlo and Giulia's marriage has drifted so incrementally into staleness that when they finally awake to unfulfilled needs and forgotten dreams, they seem startled to find themselves in their own lives. Carlo, once a writer, now a pen pusher, begins an affair with an old lover, and Giulia tries to revive her acting career through a local theater production. Valentina strives to be a dancer on a popular TV show, and Paolo, desperately confused, wrestles with the pangs of young love.
Accenting modernity's superficial means of connection, Muccino's view of life focuses on the murky but endearing misdirection of people's search for self-worth. He constructs a relentless visual energy—as if the whole film is one sustained lunge forward—but chooses the most precise moments to reveal people's complexity, contradiction, and delightful irony. With amazing performances, Remember Me has the same qualities that garnered his previous film, The Last Kiss, the 2002 World Cinema Audience Award.