So Hard to Forget

With its languid pace and voice-over narration about the nature of grief and whatnot, So Hard to Forget is a very film festival type of film. Whether or not you enjoy it is going to come down to how much you like movies that are billed as “a meditation on…” Personally, these are not my favourite type of films. But within this genre, So Hard to Forget is middling to good. That makes it better than most films.

The lead character in the film is Julia. At the start of the film, Julia’s lover of over a decade, Antonia has broken up with her. Julia has a lot of trouble coping with this and spirals into a depression. Luckily for her, she has a helpful gay friend named Hugo. Hugo has also recently suffered a tragedy as his lover has died. Hugo convinces Julia to move into a house by the sea with himself and his friend Lisa. While Julia initially dislikes Lisa, Lisa’s own tragedy involving a shitty boyfriend and an abortion begin to help Julia look outside her own problems. Together, Lisa, Julia and Hugo bond and work through their grief. Additionally, Lisa’s cousin Helena visits. Helena is the first person Julia has felt attraction to and is another important step in getting over her breakup with Antonia.

In addition to the plot, a great deal of So Hard to Forget is Julia doing voice-over narration. The main subjects are relationships, sadness and loss. This absolutely can get a little pretentious. In general, I don’t love this sort of internal monologue in films. If I want to know a character’s poetic, deep thoughts, I’ll read a book. Still, as far as such inner monologues go, this one didn’t piss me off. Was it pretentious? Yes, but I’ve seen so many worse uses of internal monologue. As such, this one gets a pass.

What works about So Hard to Forget is that the characters seem human and have depth. Admittedly, it took the movie a while to get to the point where I cared about he characters but even before I did that, I can admit that the characters felt like people. Perhaps because the plot of the film is rather languid it gives the characters chances to develop quirks and opinions and whatnot that don’t really serve the plot but make the characters feel like real people. Maybe they’re not always the most interesting people but they do at least feel human as opposed to archetypes or stereotypes.

So Hard to Forget is a film where queerness isn’t really explored, it’s just a given. There’s one brief scene discussing rights for same-sex couples in Brazil but other than that, the fact that Hugo and Julia both are gay doesn’t really come up. Julia’s sad inner thoughts about relationships aren’t gendered; they’re universal statements. I applaud this film for its depiction of homosexuality as something not even worth mentioning.

I would like to reiterate how much of a “film festival” type movie So Hard to Forget is. This is for better (good character work, attention to detail) and for worse (a slow story with minimal events). Within this genre, So Hard to Forget is a good but not great example. I can understand if someone was extremely bored by this film. But, at the end of the day this was an overall competent film that achieved what it set out to do. This is not the most exciting WLW film but it is a solid piece of work with good characters.

Overall rating: 6.6/10

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