A tale of revenge told in reverse. To put it like that is not to suggest the movie goes literally in reverse motion, with people walking backwards and saying "Olleh" instead of "Hello," although that in fact is the method of the opening scene: a Polaroid snapshot gets sucked back into the camera, and a spent cartridge jumps up into the chamber of a handgun. But this just gives the movie its initial push backwards in time. After that, the scenes (in normal forward motion) are arranged in opposite order of occurrence, a bit reminiscent of the screen adaptation of Harold Pinter's play, Betrayal, or the earlier Elizabeth Jane Howard novel, The Long View. One big difference between this and those is that Memento is a thriller, not a relationship thing. Knowing how it all turns out would appear to be more crippling. Yet appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving. Another big difference is that the action here is squeezed into a tighter time frame, with each of the scenes ending at the precise point — with perhaps a second or two of repetitive overlap — where the previous scene started. Events, in others words, have been broken up arbitrarily in mid-course, so that we join them in medias res and must wait until the ensuing scene to find out how we reached that point. Still another difference, slightly soiling the purity of the concept, is that the scenes are separated by black-and-white interpolations (for explanatory purposes, mostly) of indeterminate chronology, and there's a heavy dose of verbal recapitulation right before the finish. This narrative technique proves to be a true test of your powers of concentration: a good thing in and of itself. You have to pay close attention. And you have to do what the hero himself is unable to do: to remember what came before. The trick of the thing — the inspiration and justification for the ass-backwards order of procedure — is the hero's peculiar "condition," as he refers to it, whereby he is incapable of forming new memories ever since the head injury he sustained while his wife was getting raped and murdered. Admittedly the movie is something of a stunt, a sleight of hand. The reverse-order gimmick could only work in concert with the blank-memory gimmick: copycats beware. This is a one-of-a-kind whatchamacallit designed for one use only, one time only. (Though a reverse-order sequel, strange to say, is not unimaginable.) It hangs together. It does its job. It can have no further application. But this is a work of fiction, not a kitchen implement, and in that department ingenuity counts much more than utility. Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano; written and directed by Christopher Nolan. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd