Sylvia is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life: her daughter, her job, her AA meetings. This is blown | dG1fX3Z3bEU0WWdCdFE
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00:00My BFI Player choice this week is a powerful drama from Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco,
00:05who made films like After Lucia, Chronic and New Order, featuring standout performances
00:10from Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, the latter of whom won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor
00:15at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Memory. Why did you follow me home from the party?
00:21You remember the Woodbury party last week? You were following me home.
00:32I don't know. I remember the party because Isaac showed me pictures.
00:36And you followed me home.
00:39From where?
00:42From the Woodbury party.
00:44You were at the Woodbury party?
00:45Yes, you followed me home from the Woodbury party.
00:52And you sexually abused me when I was 12 and you were 17 or 18.
00:57Okay.
01:00You like thinking about what you used to make me do?
01:05Or do you only remember when it's convenient?
01:08I don't remember.
01:11Chastain, who was nominated Best Performer at the Independent Spirit Awards, plays Sylvia,
01:16a social worker at an adult daycare centre who's been sober for 13 years. She leads an
01:21ordered life, looking after her daughter, going to AA meetings, until a chance encounter at a
01:26high school reunion throws everything into chaos. Sarsgaard is Saul, the lost soul with early onset
01:32dementia who follows her home and sleeps outside her house, and whom Sylvia remembers being involved
01:38in a terrible event from her youth. You deserve being the way you are, she tells him,
01:44before starting to doubt her own memory. What really happened back in high school? Are both
01:49of these damaged people actually trapped by a past which is increasingly uncertain?
01:54With excellent support from Jessica Harper and Merritt Weaver, Chastain and Sarsgaard conjure
01:58wholly believable characters whom the audience come to know gradually as they quietly do battle
02:04with the ghosts of alcoholism, PTSD and selective amnesia. This is a story about how much we are
02:10defined by what we remember, centring on two people who are doubted by everybody except,
02:15perhaps, each other. The haunting strains of A Whiter Shade of Pale weave in and out of the drama,
02:21creating a dreamy, melancholy ambience that emphasises the underlying themes of loss,
02:27plucking at our heartstrings as we're drawn back ceaselessly into the past.
02:45you