A Memoir Blue takes a look back at the life of a successful athlete sitting alone in an apartment full of trophies.
The press conference
A Memoir Blue opens with a press conference, a tangle of interviewer microphones aimed at the protagonist as she flinches in a flurry of camera flashes. In her right hand she holds up an Olympic swimming medal. This young woman has reached the pinnacle of her sporting career. Nevertheless, here in the hot center of world admiration, she seems distant, even depressed. Back at her apartment, her mantel sags under the combined weight of her trophies, but as dusk fills her room, she sits alone on her sofa.
Wealth and Achievement in A Memoir Blue
Wealth, fame, and high achievement are often accompanied by less desirable effects in almost every field: isolation, confusion, loneliness, an obsessive fear of losing or not maintaining what you have achieved. These negative aspects are rarely acknowledged by the successful: Complaining after achieving what everyone else desires can come across as ungrateful and grumpy. A Memoir Blue is a dialogue-free attempt to examine why success so often contains the seeds of failure, and specifically the emotional dynamic that could lead someone to channel the wild energies of childhood into the unusual demands of professional sports.
A story in A Memoir Blue
The story is told through a dream in which the champion protagonist returns to scenes from her childhood and observes her younger self at key moments in her life. This younger self is presented as a two-dimensional cartoon moving through a 3D world. You must advance the narrative using a pointer that allows for some limited interactions with the world: pushing coins into a ticket machine before boarding a train; move wooden planks to build a bridge across a river; Guide raindrops onto a newspaper to reveal a new memory in one of the photo panes. These are puzzles by only the loosest definition. This hour-long "interactive poem" offers little resistance on the way to its conclusions.
The obsession for water
At the beginning of the dream, the girl develops an obsession with water, the sea and life. She hunts fish, shares the fronds of seaweed, and all the while craves the attention of her ambitious and distant mother. The portrayal of a young single mother raising a toddler is carefully and unsentimentally staged. It is awkward to observe so closely the intimacies, the failures inherent in any parent-child relationship. You get the feeling that you shouldn't be a part of such private moments.
Conclusion
There is hope and reconciliation here, but A Memoir Blue is first and foremost a tragic portrayal of a person who has convinced himself or herself that achievement is necessary for love. The story is fragile and a little simplistic, but like Annapurna Interactive's 2018 game Florence, it manages to set a mood of captivating melancholy, enhanced by the exquisite soundtrack created by Joel Corelitz. And while A Memoir Blue feels deeply personal, it achieves that wonderful narrative trick of making the specific universally accessible.
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