The Eternal Memory

Time is elusive in the Chilean documentary The Eternal Memory. When the film opens, a woman is gently waking a man from sleep. There are no title cards, nothing signifying where we are in their timeline. But there are clues. The woman has set up the camera bedside by herself, which we will eventually come to recognize as the time during COVID lockdown, about a half-dozen years into the man’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The frame is just out of focus, a happenstance illustration of art imitating life, or the other way around. His grasp of things is fuzzy, too. As he slowly rouses, he doesn’t remember her, but he reacts warmly to this lovely woman telling him the bullet points of his life, reminding him of their shared history as husband and wife.

“Without memory, there is no identity,” the Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora wrote in 1989’s Chile: The Forbidden Memory, an anthology documenting the dark days under Pinochet. During the dictatorship, Góngora worked clandestinely in alternative media, an antidote to the state’s scrubbed version of the news; after the return to democracy, Góngora became a preeminent culture journalist, documenting Chile’s returning/evolving sense of identity. Which is all to say: If you’re going to make a movie detailing one man’s excruciating loss of memory, what luck – a cruel word for the circumstance, and we’ll come back to it – for the man in question to have spent his professional life reflecting on the meaning of memory and its essentialness.

We’ll go one further: What luck for him to be married to a woman like Paulina Urrutia, an actress and arts advocate with a trilling laugh and determination to keep her husband rooted in reality for as long as possible. We see her initiate conversations with a sense of play – following him to wherever his mind has drifted or tenderly coaxing him in another direction, exercising his mind like she does his body – and incorporating him into social and professional moments, normalizing his presence in a way that is so contrary to the way dementia patients are often treated by society.

Director Maite Alberdi became the first Chilean woman to earn an Oscar nomination with her previous film, 2020’s The Mole Agent; another nomination for The Eternal Memory seems preordained. (In January, it was awarded the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.) Skillfully interweaving archival footage (the benefit of profiling two people who’ve led very public lives), home movies, and fly-on-the-wall observations of the couple at home, The Eternal Memory is a deeply intimate portrait, shot by a crew of three – Alberdi plus a sound engineer and director of photography – until COVID struck and Urrutia becomes the only person there to record Góngora’s worsening dementia. Even as his mind goes, he still feels the warmth of her love and care. When that disappears, it is devastating.

The couple never explains on camera why they consented to the documentary, to have their most vulnerable moments documented, though in press materials the filmmaker has said that Góngora and his family saw the value in recording the progression of his disease. Truly, it is elucidating for folks who’ve never seen dementia up close, and guttingly familiar to those who have. But even more profound is the film’s record of a remarkable love. There is such tenderness there, such obvious joy they take in being together. To get to witness that bond, even – or especially – as everything else falls away, I count myself lucky indeed.