Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andrés Pepe Estrada’s Before We Forget comes at a time when the gay coming-of-age film isn’t as surprising—and some would dare to say not as necessary—as it was perhaps a decade ago. We have seen other films like this one before. However, I’d argue queer filmmaking isn’t even close to a point where every film starts to look similar, and even if Before We Forget does suffer a bit from the comparison, there’s something earnest and enjoyable about this particular journey.
The movie plays with time, memory, and longing, and brings it all back together with a grounding in family in a way that feels not just relatable but truthful. It hurts sometimes, but that’s life. Through flashbacks, glimpses of a movie within the movie—a very meta resource that will work for some and feel out of place for others—and home movies, we learn a story that is less grounded in reality and more a representation of the memory of the person trying to tell it.
Di Place plays Matias, a movie director trying to edit his film in time for a festival, but getting lost in his memories of the past the movie is based on. The movie editing becomes a young Matias in Italy, meeting and being charmed by a Swedish student called Alexander. But Matias doesn’t understand their relationship, and by extension, neither do we. That’s the crux of the movie’s discovery, the personal discovery of Matias—a discovery he will learn never really ends. You just replace your questions with new ones.
The rest you will have to discover by yourself, but it’s important to note that Before We Forget focuses heavily on the vibes and on the feelings it can evoke in us. This is especially true when the movie hones in on the familial aspect, and on the path to acceptance that for so many young queer people has been a great burden. There are no simple answers, and the movie doesn’t attempt to water down the storyline to make characters look good. Instead, there’s confusion, mistakes, and love.
This isn’t a movie that takes many risks, storytelling-wise. You might be able to predict where Before We Forget is going from very early on in the film. However, that doesn’t make the movie any less worthy of watching. Instead, it’s the performances, the ways the movie goes into how memory plays a role not just in what you do, but how you feel about certain things, that feels like a worthy exploration.
Overall, Before We Forget is not reinventing the wheel script-wise, but it’s an engaging watch that adds to the narrative of queer storytelling, and one that cares not just about the story it’s telling, but about how that story fits in the grander scheme of what a person is and can be. The last part might not be as important to some, and there might even be a line of thinking that considers this movie too simplistic, but when the message still feels as relevant as it does, sometimes the rest doesn’t matter as much.
