Before I Forget - Avant que j'oublie

I walked out of the theater in something of a daze. If Eleven Minutes played at 78 rpm, then Whirlwind was 45, and Before I Forget was 33. Things moved very slowly. The director (and lead actor) Jacques Nolot probed deeply into one man's life. A man, who at 60, faces the uncertainty of old age as the inheritance he expected slips away and his body is no longer young, beautiful, or healthy.

I was a little squirmy during the movie, it really was moving at a speed unknown in American films. Not for those with attention deficit disorder. But it was powerful and unrelenting. This was not light entertainment, this was a harsh contemplation of the meaning of life for this one individual and those of us watching.

Elliott Stein at the Village Voice writes:

Why is it that nearly all the best recent gay-themed movies are French, while most American gay flicks these days turn out to be empty wastes of time?

Of the three features we saw this week at Out North, this was the only one that took a central human question and dealt with it with enough universal depth that it will have meaning in 10 or 50 years. Eleven Minutes dealt with a relatively trivial question in a technically snappy and entertaining picture. Whirlwind took on issues that were closer to Before I Forget's issues, but was a high school level essay compared to Forget's polished, professorial treatment of the subject. It was complex, deep, subtle, an ambiguous in its examination of a life.

Warning: This was one of those movies where my tastes probably differ greatly from most people's. It's slow, has subtitles, digs deep, and has no answers.


And again, Anchorage gets to see the newest of the new. It plays tomorrow afternoon in New York. For more specifics on what the movie is about, you can go read Drier than dry, 26 October 2007 7/10 by Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California on IMDB.

Thanks Rob. This goes so much faster without video to edit.