Arrested Memory

All men are something ridiculous and grotesque, precisely because they are men.
— Friedrich Schlegel

There are films that arrive in Venice seeming to come straight from a seminar in anthropology, others from a psychoanalysis session, and still others from questionable market demands. Arrested Memory by Sabu presents itself with insolence and simply decides to make us laugh.

That is no small thing. On the contrary, at a Film Festival where seriousness often seems to have become a compulsory aesthetic category, Sabu’s film possesses an almost subversive virtue: it has fun.

The premise itself could belong to the most conventional of thrillers: a traumatized detective progressively loses his memory and becomes involved in the investigation into the kidnapping of the son of an immensely wealthy Japanese businessman. But Sabu takes this potentially dramatic material and subjects it to a grotesque twist, transforming amnesia from a psychological tragedy into a formidable comic device. Memory, instead of being the foundation of identity and rationality, suddenly becomes the great absentee. And the detective must continue to be a detective without being sure that he can remember what he has just discovered.

Lee can no longer rely entirely on the logical sequence of events. He has to proceed through intuitions, reflexes, impulses, almost automatic gestures. It is as if the detective were stripped of his mental archive and forced to investigate through a bodily, instinctive, pre-rational form of knowledge. His mind is losing pieces, but his body continues to know.

And it is precisely this contradiction that produces the comedy.

The detective forgets what he ought to know and, paradoxically, because of this, he sometimes manages to see what others cannot. Loss becomes a paradoxical form of lucidity. The absence of memory produces an excess of intuition.

Sabu thus constructs a kind of slapstick epistemology: one can arrive at the truth even when one no longer possesses the conventional tools required to reach it. It is a far from trivial idea, but the director has the intelligence never to treat it heavily. He lets it plunge into the body, into action, misunderstandings, escapes, fights and improbable situations.

And so Arrested Memory becomes a cinematic adventure on the border between action movie, comedy of the absurd and grotesque. A film that continually promises to become a thriller and continually withdraws from its own seriousness, as if every possible moment of tension already contained within it the seed of farce.

What works particularly well is that the action is never sacrificed to comedy. The film remains perfectly legible as a genre piece: it runs, chases, fights, investigates, accumulates obstacles and continually raises the stakes. The narrative machine is well-oiled and fast. Its official 87-minute running time contributes to this sense of compactness: Sabu never allows the film to become heavy, never allows the metaphor to devour the entertainment.

And it is precisely here that one of the work’s most intelligent qualities emerges: Sabu does not confuse depth with gravity.

The film can speak about memory, trauma, guilt, identity, wealth, power and violence without turning itself into a sermon. On the contrary, it prefers laughter. It is almost a statement of poetics when the director says that he continues to make films in the hope that, in the end, love and humor will remain, because the world needs to laugh. And Arrested Memoryseems to take him literally.

The kidnapping also becomes an excellent opportunity to stage the social disproportion between those who possess enough money to turn a human life into a figure and those who, instead, must actually risk their own lives to recover it. On one side there is the world of the ultra-rich, where millions of dollars can be moved with the same naturalness with which others move a suitcase; on the other, that of investigators, police officers and criminals, that is, those who have to run, shoot, fight and get hurt so that the money can continue to circulate.

Sabu observes this universe with subtle but unmistakable sarcasm. Capital stands still; those who have to recover it run. The rich can afford the luxury of turning kidnapping into an economic matter; the detective must turn it into a physical one. And in the middle there is Lee, who can no longer even remember exactly why he is there.

The grotesque is born precisely from this disproportion.

The more economically important the case becomes, the more cognitively inadequate the protagonist appears. The more the world demands rationality, the more Lee’s memory dissolves. And yet the film continues to demonstrate that chaos is not necessarily the opposite of intelligence: sometimes it is simply another form of intelligence.

The detective thus becomes an almost Beckettian figure plunged into an action movie. He must keep moving forward even when he no longer possesses the coordinates necessary to know where he is going. But unlike Beckett’s characters, Lee runs. And he runs a lot.

Ethan Juan supports this construction extremely well, because his protagonist must simultaneously be credible as an action cop and sufficiently disoriented to become a comic figure. His physical strength and cognitive fragility produce an irresistible short circuit: a man capable of confronting criminals but not necessarily capable of remembering why he is confronting them.

It is one of the film’s many comic inversions.

Yes, this aspect absolutely needs to be included, because it makes it even clearer that the grotesque does not arise solely from the detective’s amnesia, but from the entire criminal universe into which he is plunged. I would place it immediately after the passage dealing with the disproportion between the rich and the investigators, as follows:

But there is another element that makes Arrested Memory irresistibly grotesque: Lee is not simply a detective without a memory; he is a detective without a memory surrounded by a gang of criminals who seem to have lost, along with their ethics, even the most elementary professionalism of crime. They are clumsy, awkward, often inadequate, incapable of behaving according to the supposed efficiency we would expect from professionals in kidnapping and extortion. Sabu turns them into a kind of band of tragicomic amateurs, and some situations are genuine explosions of comedy. The sequence involving the bag full of money, for example, becomes almost a gag from a comedy of the absurd: money, which should represent power, control and precision, ends up becoming an object of confusion and embarrassment. Even more surreal is the episode involving the junkie dragged into the billionaires’ house, where the intruder ends up taking on an almost advisory role, offering suggestions on how to handle the footage and stage the kidnapping. It is a perfect comic reversal: in the universe of the rich and the criminals, the person who should be the last one capable of giving lessons suddenly becomes the most competent. And so the film piles one absurdity on top of another without ever losing the thread of the action. Memory is compromised, rationality falters, the criminals are incompetent, the billionaires seem to inhabit another dimension, and yet the narrative machine proceeds with almost surgical precision. It is precisely this short circuit between action and stupidity, between real danger and criminal incompetence, between limitless money and miserably human behavior, that produces the film’s most authentic entertainment: a world in which everything should be calculated and yet everything proceeds through accidents, intuitions, mistakes and absurdities.

Sabu, moreover, does not seem interested in constructing an epic of the hero. On the contrary, he continually dismantles it. The hero is a damaged, imperfect, confused, sometimes almost ridiculous man. But precisely in his imperfection he rediscovers a form of authenticity that professionalism, role and memory had perhaps concealed.

From this point of view, Arrested Memory is also a film about the possibility of finding oneself by losing oneself. The paradox is stated by Sabu himself: through the loss of memory, the protagonist gradually rediscovers the person he had forgotten he was. But Sabu’s great intuition is not to turn this idea into a conventional existential drama.

Memory here is not a monument to the past: it is a burden that can suddenly collapse. And when it does, something unexpected may emerge from beneath the rubble: instinct, desire, solidarity, the ability to recognize danger, even an elementary form of goodness.

It is a cinema that seems to say, with a certain ironic cruelty, that perhaps we are less rational than we believe and more intuitive than we are willing to admit.

But above all, Arrested Memory is a film that knows its craft perfectly.

It is funny, fast-paced, self-ironic, sarcastic, visually energetic and narratively effective. It does not claim to reinvent action cinema, nor does it need to. It is enough for it to use the conventions of the genre intelligently in order to distort them from within. In this sense, it is a genre film that takes itself far less seriously than many films that try, rather undeservedly, to strike a lofty tone. And perhaps this is precisely its small anarchic gesture towards the Festival.

In Venice, people talk a great deal about death, trauma, loneliness, forgiveness, History, identity and guilt. Sabu reminds us of something apparently simpler: that cinema can also simply entertain with artistry.

Arrested Memory is therefore a philosophically drunk action movie, an investigative comedy about the impossibility of remembering, a small narrative machine built around a great paradox: when memory comes to a halt, cinema begins to run.

Where there is no humor, there is no humanity. Ionesco