When you go into a documentary about an aged couple living with Alzheimer’s, you expect it to be sad, perhaps cloyingly so. The premise itself may be a turn-off for those of us with an aversion to the saccharine. But with The Eternal Memory, which captured the Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is streaming now on Paramount+, it’s clear right off the bat that this is not that kind of documentary. What could be a sickeningly sweet film instead is impossibly loving, in a way that makes it impossible for the viewer not to be moved.
Oscar-nominated director Maite Alberti (The Mole Agent) follows Chilean journalist Augusto Góngorra as his memory continues to degrade, his condition seemingly worsening as he lives through the pandemic lockdown. In his younger days, during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial reign, the outspoken Góngorra documented the atrocities faced by the Chilean people in the 1970s and 1980s. His role as a journalist was to preserve the collective memory, to prevent history from being lost in real time; his Alzheimer’s diagnosis stings as an ultimate cruelty.
Fortunately for Góngorra, he has his wife, Paulina Urrutia, an actress and Chile’s former Minister of Culture, who is almost saint-like in her love and patience with her ailing husband. What began as a fairly standard small documentary—the initial crew was just Alberti and two others—eventually becomes an intimate portrait of this couple. As they isolate, Paulina picks up the camera herself and captures their most private moments.
An easy watch The Eternal Memory is not. Augusto and Paulina are an incredibly loving couple, and even at his most disoriented, the love he has for his partner is clear in the way he behaves toward her. All of the most painful moments we see are tinged with an undercurrent of love; take, for example, a confused Augusto carrying a stack of his books around their house, proclaiming how hard he worked on them and how they were going to be taken from him. Paulina sits with him and calms him with the kind of extreme patience that can only come from genuine love. But the opposite is also true; the love these two share for each other can hurt to watch, not only because of the situation we see them in, but because of the enviable bond Augusto and Paulina share.
Aside from their relationship, what remains in your consciousness is The Eternal Memory’s probing of, well, consciousness—what it means and how it makes us who we are. The film’s first scene sees Augusto waking up, unable to tell who he is and who Paulina is; she reminds him that they have been married for 25 years. When The Eternal Memory zooms out, informing us along with Augusto who he is, it makes a compelling argument for his role in Chile’s national identity via his journalistic work. His panic over his books is reinforced as we cut back to the launch of his book, The Forbidden Memory, in 1990 as he speaks about the years of repression Chile endured.
The Eternal Memory reminds that community, whether on an interpersonal or a national level, is what grounds us. It’s easy to come into a film like this, about a topic so obviously upsetting, cynically. But Augusto and Paulina’s bond wins you over easily, as does Alberti’s direction. The film inspires you to care, not just about them, but about each other.