The Eternal Memory review – potent portrait of a devoted couple dealing with Alzheimer’s

Chilean director Maite Alberdi really gets elderly people and those with mental health problems. One of her previous works, The Grown-Ups, focused on adults with Down’s syndrome struggling with independence, while her international breakthrough The Mole Agent featured residents of a care home, some with dementia. This latest painfully potent film, The Eternal Memory, carves a snug room for itself in the director’s thematic wheelhouse with its portrait of a Chilean couple, utterly devoted to each other, but challenged by the husband’s progressively worsening Alzheimer’s disease.

At the same time, the film also engages with recent Chilean history, another topic Alberdi has explored previously (see Propaganda, Dios). How could it do otherwise given that the husband, Augusto Góngora, was a broadcaster and journalist who made underground documentaries about the conditions in Chile under Pinochet and edited books about the aftermath? Meanwhile, his partner and eventual wife Paulina “Pauli” Urrutia (they married 20 years after they met, a scene shown here in homemade footage) was an activist, actor and minister of state under socialist president Michelle Bachelet.

While their conversations allude to the rich and varied lives they’ve led and are still leading – the film shows Pauli performing with her company at a theatre, hoofing it up on stage impressively at one point as Augusto shuffles with amused bemusement around her – the movie largely pulls in ever tighter on the intimate private world of their coupledom. Mostly we see them just trying to get through each day as Augusto’s condition worsens. Every morning, it seems, she has to cheerfully reintroduce herself to him, and only later can she put the large photo of them on their wedding day back on the wall because otherwise he complains that he doesn’t know who those people are.

Alberdi is able to draw on rich archive resources not only to show Augusto in his younger days, at work interviewing Chileans about their own lives, but also as a private individual who liked to make home movies about himself, his two kids from a previous marriage and Pauli. You can tell just by the way he frames and films Pauli, and the way she vamps lovingly back, that the two were madly in love from the start. That love is also visible in every frame of Alberdi’s footage, and augmented by the obvious affection and respect felt for the couple by the film-maker, surviving even the darkest of times.

Towards the end, we see Augusto’s usually warm, sensual personality become fractured by anger, disorientation and despair as his memory fails him and he grows increasingly confused, unable even to recognise himself in the mirror. The devasting, unforgivable irony is that after the fall of Pinochet, he wrote so movingly about the need for the nation to remember collectively what happened. Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.

• The Eternal Memory is released on 10 November in UK cinemas.