In The Memory of a Killer, also known as The
Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer), Erik Van Looy has
done a nice job of putting together an engaging, high-concept
thriller. But once we’ve finished being caught up in it, we can’t
help noticing that the high-concept pretty much goes to waste. It
is this. A professional killer, Angelo Ledda (Jan Decleir),
realizes that he’s showing the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
His brother, Paolo (Roland De Jonghe), has already been
institutionalized with the affliction, and Angelo visits him while
he is in Antwerp to do a job. Paulo is without any memory of him —
or anything else. A nurse asks Angelo if he is a relative.
“Distant,” says Angelo with a touch of black humor we don’t see
much of thereafter.
He has been hired by a man named Seynaeve (Gene Bervoets), who
is working for Baron Gustave de Haeck (Jo De Meyere). The baron’s
ne’er-do-well son, Jean (Tom Van Dyck), has got himself into a spot
of bother over a child prostitute, Bieke Cuypers (Laurien Van den
Broeck), and is being blackmailed by one Bob Van Camp (Lucas Van
den Eynde). Angelo successfully retrieves the money and the
evidence from Van Camp, who pleads for his life with Angelo’s gun
to his head, swearing never to talk. Will Angelo spare him? Is his
moment of hesitation here a pang of conscience or another
Alzheimer’s moment? We never have the chance to find out, for Bob
suddenly decides to fight his way out of Angelo’s grasp — which
proves to be a big mistake.
Then, while Angelo is still holding his corpse, the dead man’s
daughter calls out from just round the corner, “Daddy?” She makes
as if to come and find him, and Angelo is presented with another
dilemma. There seems to be nothing to do but kill her too. Once
again, however, Van Looy lets him off the hook. The girl thinks
better of coming in search of her father and merely calls out that
she will be over at the house of a friend before leaving by another
route.
These are dim foreshadowings, however, of what happens next when
Seynaeve orders Angelo to kill Bieke, the child-prostitute.
Understandably, the moral dilemma is easier for him to resolve when
it is a question of killing in cold blood. “I won’t do it,” Angelo
tells Seynaeve. “She’s just a child.” When the latter says he’ll
get someone else, Angelo tells him: “You don’t understand. No one
will do it.” For a moment it looks as if the themes of memory and
conscience are going to be getting a bit of an airing. Angelo is
forgetting more and more things while popping pills to stave off
the effects of his incipient memory loss, but he remembers that
there are certain standards that even a hired killer won’t violate,
a line that so long as there is any cognitive function at all, he
will not cross. Moreover, his assurance to Seynaeve that he won’t
find anyone else to do the dirty work either suggests a shared
standard, a sort of code of honor of the assassins’ guild that is
as much a part of who Angelo is as any of the memories or
personality traits that are beginning to deteriorate in him. Maybe
more.
But Angelo is wrong. Seynaeve does find somebody willing to kill
a child, and that suggests Angelo is a back number in more ways
than one. As he strives desperately to hold on to his memory, to
his self, the society around him seems to have relinquished its own
moral identity without so much as a struggle. To be sure, making
the baron the chief bad guy is a bit old hat. When was the last
time anyone can remember someone with a title in a sympathetic
movie role? And he is also associated with that other favorite
cinematic whipping boy, the Roman Catholic Church. Van Looy must
have known that all he had to do was surround the baron with priest
and statues and candles to proclaim his villainy. But even these
lapses into movie shorthand have their purpose. It is to underscore
the extent to which a country in which aristocrats and clergymen
were once the most highly honored people is itself losing its
collective memory.
It’s a good idea, even a great idea for a movie, but Van Looy
doesn’t seem to know quite where to go with it. From this point on
the picture is a pretty routine thriller, as Angelo goes after the
bad guys one by one while playing a rather too-familiar game of
cat-and-mouse with the policeman, Eric Vincke (Koen De Bouw), who
is trying to catch him before he can kill again. Vincke, the jaded
but sensitive cop, has also been done too many times before. And
for an American audience, it may be a bit confusing to sort out the
deadly bureaucratic rivalry between Vincke’s agency, a branch of
the public prosecutor’s office, and the Gendarmerie, which is
corrupted by the agents of the wicked baron.
By the end, the movie-ish qualities of the movie threaten to
take over as the good cops are sent off by Angelo on a pointless
treasure-hunt for an incriminating audio cassette which is their
only chance of thwarting the bad cops and nailing the baron. If he
remembers enough to drop hints about where he has hidden the thing,
why doesn’t he just tell them? In short, the film is too long and
unnecessarily complicated, and the most interesting thing it has to
say is said half-way through. But Mr. Decleir’s Angelo almost makes
it worth seeing. Anyway, you won’t be bored.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie
critic.
