I Remember Me

Film Reviews DVD
I Remember Me

"How do you come to know something as fact, when science can't explain it?" Kim Snyder asks in her documentary I Remember Me. "Without proof, you're left with personal anecdote." Snyder is referring to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which has affected her since 1995. A film-industry lifer, Snyder chose to deal with her problem through cinema, by making a documentary. She interviews other sufferers, including U.S. women's soccer star Michelle Akers and filmmaker Blake Edwards, and traces the roots of the syndrome through well-documented clusters of CFS in Nevada and Florida. The title of I Remember Me implies a focus on the debilitating effects of CFS on Snyder's own life and work, but though she recounts her ups and downs in brief self-interviews, the filmmaker mostly points the camera elsewhere, appearing on the edges of the frame as a questioner and comforter. The biggest problem with I Remember Me lies in the maudlin approach she takes to those interviews; Snyder spends fully five minutes of her 74-minute run time hugging her subjects, and she induces a near-fatal cringe when she asks a bedridden high-school boy, "What makes your heart sing?" The sap is hard to stomach mainly because the film's medical inquiries are so tough. Snyder delves into the controversy surrounding the condition's name—which makes it sound like a disease for delicate Victorian ladies, as opposed to a insidious, lingering, incapacitating viral infection—and examines how some frustrated doctors prefer to assume that CFS is psychosomatic rather than admit that they can't determine how it's contracted or how to treat it. I Remember Me is a structural and conceptual mess, crippled by an inconsistent point of view and a director who limits her self-portrayal to victim and sympathizer, but the testimonials Snyder elicits from people who've been inexplicably stricken are nevertheless haunting. Even more unsettling is the confusion and occasional indifference of the medical community, as physicians are reduced to staring at X-rays and musing, "I wonder what those white spots are?" while their patients lie paralyzed with aches and exhaustion.

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