There is an awkwardness to watching the intimacies, the failures inherent in any parent-child relationship, from such proximity the feeling that you shouldn’t be party to such private moments. The depiction of a young single mother raising a small child is carefully and unsentimentally portrayed. A Memoir Blue is a dialogue-free attempt to explore why success so often contains the seeds of failure, and specifically the emotional dynamics that might lead someone to channel the wild energies of childhood into the unusual demands of professional sports.Įarly in the dream we see the girl develop an obsession with water, the sea and aquatic life, chasing fish, parting the fronds of sea plants, all the while longing for the attention of her ambitious and detached mother. These negatives are rarely acknowledged by the successful: to complain after one has gained what everyone else desires can seem ungrateful and churlish. Wealth, glory and high attainment, in almost any field, are often accompanied by less desirable effects: isolation, confusion, loneliness, an obsessive anxiety about losing, or failing to maintain that which has been won. Back at her apartment we see her mantelpiece sag under the combined weight of her trophies, but as dusk fills her room, she sits alone on her sofa, bereft. Yet despite this she appears detached, even glum, here in the hot centre of the world’s adulation. This young woman has reached the pinnacle of her athletic career. In her right hand she holds aloft a swimmer’s Olympic medal.
A Memoir Blue opens at a press conference, a thatch of interviewers’ microphones aimed at the protagonist as she flinches in a lightning storm of camera flashes.
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