"All's well that ends well"
We are all familiar with this phrase/play of William Shakespeare. A story may have a beginning, a middle but the most important thing is the ending that holds the base of any story line, whether it is predictable or not.
But what happens when the story doesn't end the way it should be?
Christopher Nolan, introduced a wonderful way of storytelling in his movie "MEMENTO". Here the story is about an insurance company investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), whose wife gets raped and murdered & he was left alive and injured by the culprit with a brain damage. He suffers from a short term memory loss but not to be confused with amnesia. Leonard seeks for the revenge of his wife's murderer.
The story is narrated out of sequence, with some scenes in monochrome, and at a hectic rate. This gets us involved into the film to use our own memories to reconstruct the chronological narrative. Director Nolan has used the technique of showing every sequence of the movie like the game of jumble words. The scratches on Leonard's cheek- where did they come from? Having essential information tattooed on his body- who did this and when? Meeting the attractive barmaid Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss)-- why he wants to meet her suddenly or is she using him on the other way round?
Thus while watching the movie, we question our own perception of the world.
"But even if you get revenge you're not gonna remember it. You're not even going to know that it happened" Natalie tells Leonard somewhere in between the movie.
So where does the story end? It's hard to reconstruct our own memories but with a line "Where was I?"
If we go back little earlier, Quentin Tarantino brought a new technique of story telling in his movie "PULP FICTION (1994)" which is considered as one of the Hollywood classic. Apart from classy style, the ending of the movie makes us wonder when John Travolta moves out of a restaurant with Samuel L.Jackson, when we see him killed inside an apartment sometimes back into the movie.
So where does the story end? ...
