In the world of Greek director Christos Nikou’s debut feature film Apples, it could literally happen to anyone: You go about your day — perhaps to buy a bouquet of flowers — board a bus, nod off in your seat, and wake up at the end of the line with your memory erased.
Such is the predicament facing Aris (Aris Servetalis), who finds himself one of countless victims of a global pandemic of amnesia. With no ID in his belongings and no awareness of his address, Aris is hospitalized in short order, his life reduced to a number (patient 148142) and a designation of “unidentified.” When days (or is it weeks?) pass without his family retrieving him from the facility, he is enrolled in New Identity, a state-run program for long-term amnesiacs.
He is supplied with a sparsely furnished apartment, enough money for survival, and cassette tapes offering daily instructions for his reemergence into society. (Judging by the analog technology deployed throughout the film, I would place the movie’s timeframe as the early 1980s, though such details are intentionally left vague.)
This series of tasks, undertaken by Aris and countless comrades in the same memory-deprived quandary, involve basic tests — one of which proves that, yes, you never forget how to ride a bike — as well as elaborate orders that border on the surreal and the mournful. One day, he’s invited to a strip club, where he is permitted to grab the dancer “anywhere he wants.” In another, he’s required to attend, like a nurse or a chaplain, to the final days of a hospice patient, then visiting his funeral and providing comfort to his family. For each completed task, he is to provide photo documentation, via Polaroid camera, so his programmers can track his progress.
This scenario could potentially take a nightmarish direction, as in last year’s similarly oriented indie drama Little Fish (available on Hulu). But Nikou approaches the subject, for much of the running time, as a deadpan comedy, one similar in tone to the Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki, where wry absurdities blunt the more devastating implications of the premise.
But Nikou is after something deeper even than his ingenious concept suggests. The movie’s title refers to Aris’ favorite food, the taste for which he discovered his first day in the neurological hospital. Or is it, in fact, a rare remnant from his former life — a breadcrumb to an otherwise inaccessible memory bank? There’s no cure for his malady, so such clues should not exist, and yet for Aris these minute “leakages” seem to occasionally surface.
As much as a clever science-fiction premise, perhaps Apples is a reflection on the human tendency to avoid discomfort by any means necessary. The term “blissful ignorance” endures for a reason, and Apples subtly presents both sides of its central dysfunction. When one has experienced pain, the idea of starting anew — of not knowing what one has suffered — can be a soothing balm.
Every time there’s a tragedy, on a global or local scale, we’re told to “never forget.” This brilliant fable, a movie both out of time and of its time, offers an irresistible, if ultimately unsustainable, counter-argument.
APPLES. Director: Christos Nikou; Cast: Aris Servetalis, Sofia Georgovassili, Anna Kalaitzidou; Distributor: Cohen Media Group; Not rated; in Greek with English subtitles; Now showing at Living Room Theaters at FAU