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Film

Indie flicks: Right on the mark

By STEVE PERSALL
Published October 20, 2005

Memory of a Killer (R) (120 min.) - Erik Van Looy's film was released overseas in 2003 as De Alzheimer Zaak (The Alzheimer Case), a title suggesting a documentary on the disease rather than the gripping crime drama it is. Already there's talk about it being remade for American audiences, but as we've seen numerous times, that could be a mistake.

Van Looy fashions a semimystery around Angelo Ledda, an aging hired killer played with terrific screen presence by Jan Decleir, a veteran of Belgian cinema. Ledda is slipping into the same condition as his estranged brother in a nursing home; Alzheimer's disease isn't something a hit man needs. Retirement isn't an option in his trade, but a sliver of morality remains in his mind, exposing a sleazy conspiracy reaching to high government levels.

The movie begins with a father pimping his 12-year-old daughter to a john who turns out to be undercover detective Eric Vincke (Koen De Bouw). The case appears closed when we meet Ledda accepting two connected assignments from an anonymous employer. It is business as usual except Ledda is vaguely detached from the conversation, even forgetting his lunch order.

The first hit is a success, but the second - which won't be revealed here - is something Ledda won't do. Instead, he turns his fading mental capacity and killer instincts to find whoever would want such a thing done, and why. Meanwhile, pragmatic Vincke and his touchy partner Freddy Verstuyft (Werner De Smedt) are finding bodies with the same gunshot patterns from different guns.

Ledda could be using multiple weapons. He's certainly crafty enough, and Van Looy uses optical effects suggesting episodes of memory lost and regained in incriminating situations. Like the hero of Memento, he writes reminders of key information on his arm to keep everything as straight as possible. Eventually, Vincke understands someone - perhaps Ledda - is perversely working on his side, killing the bad guys. How the corpses are linked and who's getting away with murder becomes the question.

Memory of a Killer has plenty of American movie elements: rule-bending detectives, a couple of sexy interludes, fat cats primed for falls and shootouts. It also has that European attitude of plot trumping artifice in criminal cinema and Ledda's unusual brand of heroism. The key to the latter is Decleir's performance as both a monster and victim of his failing health. Actors in his age bracket - Harrison Ford comes to mind - occasional get such roles but seldom act their age.

Van Looy skirts that mistake a few times as co-screenwriter with Carl Joos; Ledda's confused episodes all occur at precisely the right time to keep the story going, after he has been a stalking machine. But Van Looy's pacing as director doesn't leave much time for noticing any problems. I kept thinking of Jonathan Demme's strangling tension in The Silence of the Lambs, no small compliment. Memory of a Killer is so solid in all respects that an English-dubbed version of this would be preferable to seeing how Hollywood would ruin it. Grade: A

[Last modified October 19, 2005, 10:43:05]