Somewhere deep within the nearly two-hour slog of this would-be suspense-thriller is a borderline watchable 15-minute short film. Languid pacing—punctuated by incessant flashbacks, shifting identities and insufferable redundancy—is far from the only flaw in writer-director Marco Bazzi’s film, but it’s certainly its most unavoidable.
This film is a chore to sit through, largely because the preposterous plot is compounded by a lifeless script that doesn’t exude an inkling of self-awareness, which could otherwise make the scenery-chewing performances at least enjoyable in their contrivances. But this is a psychobabble-saturated film that wields the ponderous title of Reflections of a Broken Memory while employing multiple images of mirrors shattering as a heavy-handed metaphor for a fractured mind. It unsubtly uses shattered mirrors for multiple major plot points, including the roving placement of a childhood scar as an indicator of reality versus fantasy, and it even uses mirror shards as a murder weapon.
Opening with a post-tragedy interrogation of a Detective Suarez (Gladise Jiminez)—the only character with a hint of pathos—we quickly cut to our main man Jay (Raphael Sikic), who stares into the camera and philosophizes about his troubled mind and how he’s only found obsession and “cold deep darkness” when he’s otherwise been searching his whole life for a moment’s peace. He lights a cigarette with the emphatic flick of a Zippo and exhales meditatively. We see images of cops closing in and there’s some whimpering in the background from whomever is unlucky enough to be the recipient of this diatribe.
Next thing he knows, Jay is outside, kneeling on the lawn while pointing a gun at his head. He doesn’t know why. But as the cops—who were actually approaching moments later in one of many perplexing bits of nonlinearity—discover a body lying on the floor, they don’t reach for their tasers or even shout at Jay to drop his weapon. Instead, they bring in Detective Suarez to talk him down. She ends up calling in the clinical therapist (Mark Vidano) of Jay’s dead sister, Judie (Sandy Mölling), so he can help unwind the complex web that is Jay’s tortured psyche.
Everyone involved wants nothing more than to get to the bottom of Jay’s trauma, to find out what makes him tick, despite the fact he’s a murder suspect holding a gun while within spitting distance of a still-warm corpse. If only they can figure out what in his childhood caused Jay to live a life of darkness and obsession, maybe, just maybe, they can save him from himself.
Perhaps the problem is his loathsome mother (Helene Udy), who we first see, in a flashback six months prior, cartoonishly hissing at Jay about bringing a “slut” to Judie’s funeral. Freudian overtones are as blatant as the film’s title, as Jay sneers at his mom that she’s just jealous that he cares for someone other than her. But maybe it has more to do with Jay’s tense relationship with his boyfriend, Sean (Eric Newcombe), the body we see lying on the floor. And then there are all these flashbacks to a little boy in a mask. Who knows, but let’s not bother arresting Jay and sorting through all this at the station; why do that when we have a clinical therapist in Detective Suarez’s earpiece helping her guide Jay through the labyrinth of his mind.
All that we really need to know about Jay—more, really—is accomplished in the first act, and yet the film keeps plodding along, one flashback or shift in identity at a time. It’s like pulling teeth, then contemplating what really is the root of a tooth, anyway. Moments of technical competence in cinematography and occasionally compelling imagery are undone by the film’s insistence on continually pulling a series of threadbare rugs out from under the viewer. What results is a drab, lifeless, desperate attempt at the verve of successfully gritty and mind-bendy films like Fight Club or Memento. Instead, Reflections of a Broken Memory is best quickly forgotten.
Photo courtesy of Indican Pictures
The post Reflections of a Broken Memory appeared first on Spectrum Culture.