★★★★½
Australian music group Hear My Eyes returned to Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on the weekend in partnership with Melbourne International Film Festival to bring audiences a new re-imagining of another cult classic film, Memento.
Fresh from teaming up with the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio and co to deliver their take on James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Hear My Eyes have teamed up with Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard to re-imagine Christopher Nolan’s debut feature, released in 2000.
Before major claims to fame like Oppenheimer, Interstellar and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan first made a name for himself with Memento, a neo-noir thriller that in many ways serves as the genesis of the filmmaker we know today. Starring Guy Pearce, Memento follows a man with short-term memory loss determined to find his wife’s killer.
To bring the audience into the protagonist’s head space, the scenes are presented in reverse chronological order, starting at the end of the story and moving back to the beginning.
Layers to the narrative are slowly revealed to the audience, completely re-contextualising future events they have already seen, by the end turning the entire plot, as the audience understood it, on its head.
Memento itself holds up some 26 years later. Guy Pearce joins co-stars Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano, who all turn in stellar performances. The mystery at the centre of the film, teamed with the unique elements employed by Nolan to convey the protagonist’s condition, comes together in exceptionally satisfying fashion.
On its own merits, it is a film worth experiencing for anyone who is a fan of Christopher Nolan’s more recent output or even those simply looking for a tight mystery thriller for their Friday night movie watching.
Australian outfit Hear My Eyes have been teaming up with various artists over the past few years to bring audiences re-imagined experiences for cult films. Back in April, the team stepped into more mainstream territory by pairing the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) up with Terminator 2.
Off the back of that, they have made the clever choice to take an obscure release from a director whose latest film, The Odyssey, is now screening globally.
Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh, the drummer for Melbourne-based rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, enters the mix by providing an original, entirely percussive score played live over the film. With Terminator 2, MESS had a very traditional approach, with a score that was meticulously composed and rehearsed.
Doing Memento, CAVS approaches the whole thing with a much more improvisational quality, swiftly moving between two custom drum kits to deliver his strictly percussive soundscape.
His “prog rock” kit provides these dream-like synthetic beats, sometimes droning on to underpin a moment of tension or to provide a more dream-like ambience to scenes. On the other side of the stage, his more traditional jazz kit provided swinging beats, enhancing the more noir elements of the film and punching up the more action-packed sequences as well.
It is worth noting that despite the improvisational quality to the performance, CAVS’ drumming always manages to feel precise and meaningful to the action occurring on screen.
While the Terminator 2 experience was very comfortable to sit back and let the movie speak for itself, only kicking into high gear during that film’s action sequences, CAVS was more than happy to jump right to the forefront even in the quieter, more dialogue-driven moments of Memento. This comes off as a harmless, if not welcome, decision to fans of the film. But for audiences seeing Memento for the first time, it may deter their experience.
At its best, however, like during the film’s final sequence, CAVS’ drumming becomes almost cacophonous, as all the threads in the story begin to fall into place, while still leaving those breaths for the dialogue and performances in the movie to shine.
For fans of the film, Hear My Eyes’ take on Memento is certainly not one to miss.
Hear My Eyes – Memento runs to 9 August at Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Melbourne International Film Festival. 100 St Kilda Road Southbank Vic 3006.
It then runs in Sydney on 29 August at City Recital Hall.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.hearmyeyes.com.au/events/memento/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/artscentremelbourne/ and https://www.instagram.com/hearmyeyes/
Photo credits: Simon Aubor
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