Review: “The Eternal Memory” [Sundance 2023]

I went into The Eternal Memory, a documentary following the slow mental decline of an Alzheimer’s victim, deeply wary. From the moment the project was set in motion, Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi set out to create footage that could only ever be primally devestating. A choice like that requires immense responsibility, that she honor and respect their dignity for the person being documented, and that she authentically portray the illness to the viewer. Only a few crucial misclaculations and the film would be rendered repugnant, manipulative misery porn. Luckily, Alberdi (who had already proven herself a filmmaker of unusual tenderness, most recently with her Oscar-nominated film The Mole Agent) rises to the challenge, and she does so by focusing not on the darkness of Alzheimer’s but on the love that keeps the lights on, ever so briefly.

The centerpiece of The Eternal Memory is its heartrending footage of Chilean newsman/scholar Augusto Góngora in the throes of emotional oblivion, made more horrifiyng by his brief bouts of lucidity. As hard as it is to watch his gradual decline, these moments are compounded by the constant presence of his wife and caretaker Paulina Urrutia (an actress of note and at one time also Chile’s minister of culture). Paulina’s love for Augusto is the love we all want, as is her patience, perseverence and openness. She enters a true living nightmare, but her ability to stay there voluntarily is also evidence of true love. Thus, in addition to being an unflinching, ugly document of disease, the film is also a stirring, beautiful romantic portrait.

Around the sequences of Augusto’s deterioration are masterfully curated bits and pieces of the couple’s past, both before they met and throughout their 23-year relationship. Home videos give thier romance more dimension and candid vivaciousness, while snippets of Augusto’s TV reporting during the Pinochet era explain why nothing makes the Alzheimer’s-striken version of him more upset than the idea of being separated from the work he’s done. These glimpses at Augusto’s journalistic accomplishments highlight the bitter irony that a man who devoted his life to building and maintaining a nation’s cultural memory is now forced to lose his own for all the world to see.

From that irony, Alberdi draws genuine beauty. Augusto’s reporting, she illustrates, demonstrated that while vital historical moments fade to time, the past can be kept alive through the diligent work of true lovers of history. Without knowing it, Paulina uses this same principle on her husband: even as his brain fails to retain his memories, she recounts them for him. Sometimes this seems to have little effect, but other times it’s as though she’s able to place the memories back inside him, if only momentarily. The idea that love has the power to keep memory alive feels like the territory of Hallmark, but the movie proves it is not.

Questions about ethics linger. Unlike 2020’s Dick Johnson Is Dead, in which both Kristen Johnson and her father openly grapple with the ramifications of filming the latter’s Alzheimer’s, whatever conversations Alberdi, Augusto and Paulina had about shooting The Eternal Memory are totally absent from the film. Though it isn’t necessarily a moral requirement to disclose such things, it’s hard not to wonder how the pre-illness Augusto might feel about the world seeing him in the state depicted here. The worse his condition gets in the film, the more distracting these unasked questions become.

While not always easy to do, setting ethics aside is a necessary measure with so many documentaries. Ethics aside, then, the film is a unique, tender love story that hides a surprisingly layered meditation on the nature of memory more broadly. That it can be so heartbreaking and charming at the same time is a testament to Alberdi’s emotional acuity, harnassed by her sheer filmmaking craft. Alberdi has made sure Augusto and Paulina’s love will never be forgotten, so long as there are audiences willing to learn from them.

Score: 7 out of 10

The Eternal Memory premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by MTV later this year.