In recent years, movies about senility and mortality have taken on a pitilessly bleak, frightening tenor, notably in such awards magnets as “Amour,” “Vortex” and “The Father.” Preferring a less grim approach is the Netherlands’ submission to the Oscar international feature race this year. Jelle de Jonge’s “Memory Lane” is a sometimes boisterous, ultimately affirming seriocomedy about an elderly couple who take a road trip to retrace some of their youthful steps, probably for the last time. A hit on its home turf earlier this year, de Jonge’s film is a well-crafted crowdpleaser that should cross borders with relative ease … unlike its oft-squabbling protagonists.
Jaap (Martin van Waardenberg) and Maartje (Leny Breederveld) have been married close to half a century. But despite their material comfort, the 70-somethings aren’t exactly enjoying a harmonious retirement. He’s an endless grumbler whose doomsaying view that “the world’s on fire” gets reinforced by constantly watching TV news — which is all bad news, of course. He’s withdrawing from even the things that used to give pleasure, such as singing in a church choir, of which he complains, “All the good ones have left. The ones that stayed are all deaf.”
Maartje, by contrast, still yearns for company and fun, two things her spouse has ceased to provide. His negativity irks, and his self-absorption is such that he seemingly hasn’t noticed her cognitive decline. When it’s pointed out by a concerned old friend, he shrugs it off, obstinately insisting that her aberrant behaviors are done solely to annoy him. Nonetheless, they soon escalate to a point where they can no longer be dismissed, with one absent-mindedly wandering incident requiring her return home by police.
Perhaps sensing on some level that time is running out, Maartje fixates on visiting an old friend who’s written from Spain, recalling shared good times past while he’s reduced to hospice care. A major trip is the last thing wanted by Jaap, who can barely motivate himself to leave the house. Nonetheless, he finally caves, agreeing to drive them both in their 30-year-old car to Barcelona. It’s a picturesque but problematic journey: Maartje is a disastrous navigator, is prone to mistake strangers for longtime acquaintances, has spells of confusion, panic, mercurial and childish emotions.
The destination, however, is not just a bittersweet reunion with long-lost loved ones, but a realization for Jaap of his taken-for-granted dependency on the partner who’s leaving him … at least mentally, for reasons beyond anyone’s control. While Marijn de Wit and the director’s tight script hangs on the plot hook of Maartje’s escalating dementia, its emotional arc rests on Jaap’s gradual return to full marital partnership. That evolution won van Waardenberg a Golden Calf as best actor last month. (“Memory Lane,” whose original title “De Terugreis” is translated onscreen as “Homeward,” also took the best film prize.) Breederveld is equally good as an innate free spirit whose frustrations over a life too conventionally lived erupt in unexpected ways as she succumbs to dementia.
Briskly paced, de Jonge’s movie covers a lot of ground both tonal and geographic without ever seeming hurried, conspicuously touristic or heavy-handed in its mix of humor and pathos. Its overall impact is not unlike another episodic, autumnal road-trip tale from exactly 50 years ago, Paul Mazursky’s “Harry and Tonto.”
