A Memoir Blue opens at a press convention, a thatch of interviewers’ microphones aimed on the protagonist as she flinches in a lightning storm of digicam flashes. In her proper hand she holds aloft a swimmer’s Olympic medal. This younger lady has reached the head of her athletic profession. But regardless of this she seems indifferent, even glum, right here within the scorching centre of the world’s adulation. Again at her condo we see her mantelpiece sag beneath the mixed weight of her trophies, however as nightfall fills her room, she sits alone on her couch, bereft.
Wealth, glory and excessive attainment, in nearly any discipline, are sometimes accompanied by much less fascinating results: isolation, confusion, loneliness, an obsessive anxiousness about dropping, or failing to take care of that which has been received. These negatives are hardly ever acknowledged by the profitable: to complain after one has gained what everybody else wishes can appear ungrateful and churlish. A Memoir Blue is a dialogue-free try and discover why success so usually incorporates the seeds of failure, and particularly the emotional dynamics that may lead somebody to channel the wild energies of childhood into the weird calls for of professional sports activities.
The story is advised through a dream, through which the champion protagonist (she is rarely named) returns to scenes in her childhood and watches her youthful self at key moments in her life. This youthful self is rendered as a two-dimensional cartoon shifting by a 3D world. You will need to nudge the narrative alongside utilizing a pointer that enables just a few restricted interactions with the world: pushing cash right into a ticket machine earlier than boarding a prepare; shifting planks of wooden to create a bridge throughout a river; guiding raindrops on to a newspaper to disclose a brand new reminiscence in one of many picture panes. These are puzzles solely in line with the loosest definition; this hour-long “interactive poem” presents meagre resistance en path to its conclusions.
Early within the dream we see the woman develop an obsession with water, the ocean and aquatic life, chasing fish, parting the fronds of sea crops, all of the whereas eager for the eye of her formidable and indifferent mom. The depiction of a younger single mom elevating a small youngster is fastidiously and unsentimentally portrayed . There's an awkwardness to watching the intimacies, the failures inherent in any parent-child relationship, from such proximity; the sensation that you just shouldn’t be social gathering to such non-public moments.
There's hope and reconciliation right here, however A Memoir Blue is primarily a tragic depiction of an individual who has satisfied themselves – or who has been satisfied – that attainment is important for love. The story is fragile and a bit of easy however, like writer Annapurna Interactive’s 2018 sport Florence, it succeeds in making a temper of compelling melancholy, heightened by Joel Corelitz’s beautiful soundtrack. And whereas A Memoir Blue feels deeply private, it achieves that miraculous narrative trick of constructing the particular universally approachable.
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