Presented by Momento Films and Harpoon Media, BEFORE WE FORGET is a coming-of-age teen drama with romance and queer cinema elements.The film follows an Argentinian filmmaker who looks back on unresolved memories from his youth at an international boarding school in Italy as he works to finish a movie about his formative first love.

I remain a fan of interpersonal cinema and drama. I know I’m known as something of a Superheroes & Horror guy, but I still love me a well told drama. I have a big heart, what can I say? Give me a tale of characters and their interpersonal journeys, and I’m a sucker for it most every time.

I was recently gifted an advanced screener for the film Before We Forget through my association with the So Wizard Podcast. Before We Forget tells the story of Mattias, both as an adult and as a young man, and how he reconciles the sadness of his past with the man he has grown to become.

As a youngster, Mattias travels from his home in Argentina to Italy to attend a boarding school for talented kids. Mattias is painfully shy as he arrives at the school, but on day one, he makes a group of friends that includes the Swedish Alexander.

It quickly becomes apparent that Mattias and Alexander have more than just rapport. Mattias obviously has feelings for his comrade, though he never seems quite sure that his emotions are reciprocated. In the present day, Mattias’ older self wrestles with his past connection as he works on finishing a film about his own childhood.

How will Alexander and Mattias work through their feelings in the past? And how will their ultimate dynamic affect Mattias’ project in the present?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ “Somehow, heartache feels good in a place like this”. No, I didn’t watch this at an AMC theater, but the sentiment still hits even watching this at home. Before We Forget is a story of missed opportunity and youthful first love and uncertainty and reclamation. There is a ton of heart and soul to this movie, and you can tell that co-creators Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andres Pepe Estrada put every bit of themselves into it.

There are moments that just linger with you from this effort, and I’ll talk about another one of them in the next Up. But for here, I want to point out a scene where Mattias is in the car driving to an airport with his parents. As a viewer you aren’t sure where the moment is going to go, but it ends up in exactly the scene it should be.

+ Santiago Madrussan and Oscar Morgan have superb chemistry as the college-aged iterations of Mattias and Alexander. They are definitely talented performers, and their connection feels so real. The scene I alluded to above is their separation at Christmas: it is so powerful and heartfelt not just because of the writing, but because Morgan and Madrussan sell the moment with their acting. They are the stand-outs of this picture.

Honestly, everybody does solid work across this picture, including writer/director Juan Pablo Di Pace who stars as the adult Mattias. But there is no comparison to the kids here.

– Speaking of him, you need present day Mattias to really be able to tell this story and not have Before We Forget be just half a movie, but I found the present day aspect of the story to be weaker than the college-aged part of the tale. Maybe that’s because the past is so powerful here, but I was far less engaged in modern day Mattias trying to make a film than I was in his childhood self experiencing feelings that he never knew if they were reciprocated.

It is just a bit stereotypical to have a film be about a filmmaker, and I think such movies are a little frustrating at times. So maybe that is partially why the present worked less for me. But it felt as though Mattias was relitigating his own history, and I was simply more interested in the history itself.

– This goes back to my first line in my first up. The heartache is baked into the movie. But when even adult Mattias can’t ultimately solve his missed connection, it’s so devastating. I know it’s a bittersweet ending at worst, but still… I was impacted by this film enough that I wanted something more satisfying as a resolution. But perhaps that isn’t real life. And perhaps it’s what I wanted but not what I needed.

OVERALL

I was all the way in on Before We Forget. The story is so powerful and clearly important to its creators. It is something anyone can relate to because we have almost all faced the feeling of not knowing if someone we loved loved us back. The stakes are low and personal, but due to that, it impacts you so much more somehow. I was absolutely a fan of this one!