THE ETERNAL MEMORY - Mark Reviews Movies

The Eternal Memory, MTV Documentary Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2023

As journalist Augusto Góngora's condition worsens in The Eternal Memory, Maite Alberdi's documentary becomes more and more difficult to watch. That's not only because we're watching the deterioration of a man's mind to Alzheimer's disease as it happens. It's also because one wonders if the film's subject would have consented to having this chapter of his life recorded in such intimate detail, if he had been aware of what that would fully entail.

As it stands, though, Alberdi's record of the impact of Alzheimer's on the person afflicted with it and those who care for that person is worth watching, if only because of the level of openness and honesty the film presents. There's no sense of false optimism here, because this disease provides none of it. It's a constant struggle, especially for Góngora's wife Paulina Urrutia, an actor and government official promoting the arts, who must watch the man she has loved for a quarter of a century essentially disappear before her eyes.

The film is as much Urrutia's story as it is Góngora's, because Alberdi keeps the two of them in frame during interviews. Biographically, it's more about the journalist, whose life, as well as his passion for politics and the arts, has been broadcast on television in his native Chile for most of his professional life.

He covered local filmmakers and other artists, after spending most of the reign of Augusto Pinochet looking into the dictator's abuses of power to the extent that anyone could. There's a horrific moment when Góngora, who cannot always remember that Urrutia is his wife, recalls in perfect detail how his friend was murdered under the Pinochet regime. Are such traumas so strong as to persist even in the face of this disease and overshadow even the memory of a loved one? If such is the case, is that why Góngora clings so dearly to his books and wanders his home at night, searching for friends who aren't there?

There are no answers in Alberdi's film, because it simply is a first-hand document, captured both by the filmmakers and by Urrutia herself in multiple private moments of her husband awakening to confusion, becoming more cognizant during the day, and losing all of that ground by the evening. At a certain point, as the COVID-19 pandemic emerges and keeps the two sheltered in their home, those periods of awareness become practically non-existent.

It often feels as if we must watch this film, because it is such a personal, unhindered look at the devastation of Alzheimer's. Just as often, though, one wonders if we should be watching The Eternal Memory for those same reasons and because whoever Góngora (who died two months ago) was when he gave consent to be filmed is, at a certain point, no longer the man we're seeing on screen. Those are tough questions we should be asking, too, and accidentally, the film provides a good starting point for them.

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