I have a confession to make: it took me two viewings for Memento to make any sense to me. The first time, I was more impressed than comprehending, and the onslaught of revelations near the end almost shut my brain down from overload; the second time, my respect increased tenfold as (most) everything fell into place. One hopes Memento will earn more of a distinction than simply "the most difficult movie of 2001" - like last year's Timecode, whose brilliance also stemmed from highly demanding formal conceits - and will serve as sufficient proof that the film scene is not entirely devoid of creativity.

Here's the problem: Memento's challenge rests on not one, but two unique storytelling approaches working in tandem. The first, your tacit acceptance of the protagonist's particular condition - Leonard (Guy Pearce), trying to save his wife from a rapist in their home, receives a blow to the head that subsequently robs him of the ability to retain any new memories (past the assault) for more than a few minutes. Second, the scriptwriter found it necessary to tell the tale in reverse. Not strictly backwards, as in everyone's dialogue can be screened for backmasking, but the scenes are presented in reverse order. This means the scene you are currently watching will end where the previous one began. Filmmakers have rarely entrusted viewers with so much.

But this is exactly how Leonard himself experiences things: suddenly in media res, not knowing where he is, constantly starting over, which always leads his mind back to the last thing he remembers - his wife's assault, and his desire for vengeance. And then he sees the tattoos he's put all over his body, instructing him that he has yet to bring the criminal(s) to justice, and listing the salient facts of their identity he's learned up to that moment. He proceeds a few minutes in his quest, then forgets everything again. And it's only as we proceed further back in the story that the puzzle starts to come together. Pity Leonard will never have the gift of hindsight gradually and uniquely conferred upon us.

We're not left completely stranded at the beginning. The writer and director, Christopher Nolan, is generous enough to intermittently give us phone conversations of Leonard with an unknown caller (these scenes do proceed in chronological order), gradually explaining his "condition" and the routine he's established to keep himself functioning in the face of regular blackouts. His system includes constantly taking picutres of where he goes, which car is his, whom he associates with (and who not to trust), and he's come to instinctively search his pockets for these Polaroids each time he "wakes up." Among these snapshots are the two other major players in this mystery: Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), some sort of cop who seems to know him and his whereabouts very well, and Natalie (Carrie-Ann Moss), who seems intent on helping him find his prey. Both people you intermittently trust and then don't; such is the film's power to unleash entire schools of red herrings.

Here's where anyone who remembers their high school literature classes will start getting a headache. "Exposition" comes first, right? Director Nolan's challenge was to insert sufficient exposition at the tale's chronological "denoument," and save the real revelations (or "climax") for the beginning. Has anyone ever tried this before? Our journey through Memento involves a slow taking away of certain story elements (a scratch on Leonard's cheek, a man tied up in a hotel closet) while replacing them with their narrative causes. And there are answers given whose questions you have to wait for, e.g., how far back do Natalie and Terry fit into the story? This will prove either maddening or fascinating to you, but be assured the questions to your answers do come.

But then the film starts to inject doubt into everything you see and know, just as you're getting accustomed to the system. First casuality, the reliability of memory: as Natalie notes, "Even if you get revenge, you won't remember it," which begs the question, what if he's already completed his quest? Leonard himself quotes police records attesting "memory can be distorted . . . it's an interpretation, not a record," which is why he relies on the facts inked into his skin. (But what about his memories of his wife's rape and murder, then? Are they also subject to revision?) And then you realize his true predicament: "I can't remember to forget you," Leonard says to his absent spouse, "how can I heal if I can't feel time?" Leonard's trapped in his own special hell, one of a perpetual present, and he'll never be able to stop looking for someone to revenge himself on, never stop seeking out a mystery to solve. (Oh, and don't worry about the dubious morality of Leonard taking the law into his own hands: can you be held accountable for acts you can't remember? Indeed, is the experience of time necessary to have a soul?)

In the meantime, enjoy the ride. Leonard finds himself sitting in a hotel bathroom, bottle of gin in hand, but he doesn't feel drunk; if only he knew he was waiting to defend himself against a pursuer intent on killing him. Later/earlier, he finds himself running after - or is it from?- the same man. Natalie, refusing to believe his condition, entreats everyone in her bar to spit into Leonard's beer in front of him, then she holds onto it for a minute; when she finally serves it to him, he thanks her and swigs it down. While staying at a seedy hotel, the manager confesses to charging him for multiple rooms: "doesn't matter anyway - you'll forget I ever said this." There is plenty of humor to be found in his predicament, even if the sound of a door slamming makes him forget the punchline à la Pavlov.

Having seen it twice, that provided double the people around me to hear say "I've figured it out!" only to soon retract that statement, so be warned, whatever you believe will be subject to change, not dissimilar to Leonard's own situation. Also be warned that the film's ending (though chronological beginning) provides answers so rapidfire and so contrary to your expectations (whatever they are) that you almost imagine Leonard is better off not knowing. Now all we need do is wait for the DVD, and program it to play scenes in linear order - that is, in reverse.

If a movie requiring two viewings doesn't float your boat, how about a film with two different versions? You may have heard of the 1967 Swedish I Am Curious (Yellow) and of its erotic reputation, but there is also I Am Curious (Blue), the two titles referencing the colors of the flag of their country of origin. Why two? Why not? There have been worse gimmicks foisted on us, and though the two films have the same characters and plenty of overlapping action, both (Yellow) and (Blue) can stand on their own and entertain no less for it. But if you can see both, why not live on the edge a little?

The focus of the I Am Curious films is less a story than a portrait, and in this case it may take two films to cover the complexities of Lena, a zaftig young Swedish gal aspiring to be a movie actress. Or wait, is she a zaftig young Swedish gal who lives with her father and who's converted her bedroom into her own leftist institute and think tank? Or is the activist the role Lena the actress has been cast as? Just as the films deftly blend documentary footage (of, say, Swedes protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam) with the tales of Lena's own political, sexual, and spiritual escapades, we're aware there are several levels of reality to our understanding of the protagonists' lives. Lena's clearly romantically involved with her director on any level, and her character is meant to fall for the handsome car salesman Borje, but the actor playing Borje is also having a fling with Lena, and the love triangle produces just as much drama behind the camera as before it. This is all part of the fun of the two films, and only the beginning of it.

Lena spends good chunks of (Yellow) and (Blue) either expanding her own political awareness or challenging those of others, and her interactions with strangers on the street, at a village church, or with girls sitting on the sidelines of a village mixer, are as likely to be spontaneous as scripted. Here's where we're given plenty to think about on such topics as non-violence, the A-bomb, communism, the penal system, VD, her father's involvement in the Spanish revolution, and new age philosophies - very lofty ideas bandied about as her various romantic entanglements conversely degenerate to petty bickering and jealousy. It becomes clear Lena's love life is intertwined with her politics, and when her heart finally gets broken, her leftist ideals go down the tubes. (Or is that just what Lena's been scripted to do?)

Here (Yellow) shines brighter than (Blue) when it comes to an engaging narrative, while the latter version is more overtly political a document. And if they are to be watched in any particular order, I'd suggest (Yellow) first, as it seems to establish more clearly the relationships between everyone before it deconstructs itself too enthusiastically (as the less plot-driven (Blue) is prone to do). Amidst all this 60's/70's political dialogue is plenty of sex, yes, plenty of skin, plenty of comic interludes to remind you how seriously not to take it all, and, surprisingly, plenty of genuinely good acting. Frankly, I'm disappointed that this cinematic pair's reputation rests largely on its erotic escapades; I Am Curious is bold, inventive, never dull, and far from amateurish. By no means should you bring them to the video store clerk feeling like a dirty old man or woman. If only more people were curious.

If you've scanned the schedules of your local film arthouses the past year or so, you may have ascertained that Iranian cinema is currently enjoying a heyday of sorts here in the West. The latest opus to make its way to the Detroit area, Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, does nothing to diminish his nation's current vogue on the screen. And you may be pleased to hear this is one of those films that doesn't toy with your sense of reality, for a change.

Wind took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival a year or two ago, and it may be those Italians saw in Kiarostami's latest exploration of the Iranian countryside glimpses of their own neorealist approaches half a century ago, when a new generation of Italian filmmakers unflinchingly took their camera to all corners of society. But the neorealists couldn't resist trying to make a statement while tugging at your heartstrings, and Kiarostami is anything but driven by an agenda, or even much of a plot. The Wind Will Carry Us, like many of his previous films, serves the most basic function of filmmaking: to visually record the beauty of life, community, and the world around us.

Wind's premise is therefore appropriately vague: a crew of filmmakers travel to a remote village to film the impending death and funeral of one of its eldest women. Why they've been commissioned for such a task remains a mystery; their director occasionally speaks via cell phone to some sort of boss in Tehran, but it's never clarified if their employer is private or state-sponsored. Even less clear is when their subject plans on expiring - each time she is said to be at death's door, she subsequently rallies, and their stay stretches to weeks.

Not that this is such a bad thing. Certainly the director's indolent crew doesn't seem to mind (and we never even see their faces on camera, nor the dying woman, clueing us in to just how important the main narrative is), and as time passes the director (who poses as an engineer, as their boss insists they remain anonymous for some reason) becomes our surrogate through which we come to appreciate the casual beauty of his surroundings. Kiarostami doesn't think twice about pausing indefinitely to contemplate the scenery, and through his camera mere dirt roads, bushes, and grass become breathtaking. He seems to understand that it's often only when framed can the nature we take for granted be appreciated. And even framed within frames: the wheat fields as pictured through the village gate rival anything in Out of Africa. (It's telling that only once in Wind do we get an interior shot, and then it's pitch black - Kiarostami's all about exteriors.)

Also remarkable are the daily human interactions we witness among the villagers and the director. The dialogue always sounds completely spontaneous, and the camera effaces itself so effectively it all feels more like a documentary, like we're eavesdropping. And here's where Wind deviates from neorealism: the Italians would have everyone bemoaning their relative poverty, but here no one complains. Instead we hear old men bicker with an equally wizened tea server whether her job constitutes real work, a discussion that grows surprisingly philosophical. The director meets a ditchdigger, a mother of nine, and a schoolboy whom he regularly pumps for the latest news on the dying woman. (A running joke develops when the boy repeatedly fails to remember who his inquisitor's referring to each time he's asked "How is she?") The director often reveals his frustration over doing nothing but waiting, but we settle into a languid rhythm few movies in our own hemisphere can evoke. How often would Hollywood spend its film stock watching a dung beetle roll a ball of manure down a hill, or an apple roll down the roofs of a village carved out of the rocky hillside?

The other recurring punchline comes each time the director's cell phone rings, and he takes off in his car to find high enough ground to receive the signal. It's an effective reminder that, despite the appearances of this village, Iran is far from medieval; but like it is in the West, technology doesn't necessarily make life any easier. Indeed it's the technology inherent in the director's job that's forcing him to sit around in the village in the first place. But it's motion pictures' unique ability to grant a sort of visual immortality to anyone that makes it so irresistible, and Kiarostami punctuates Wind with a final image making the connection between the cinema and human mortality as clear as possible, as an unearthed human legbone floats down a stream, returning to the nature from which it was birthed. When so many other films enjoy throwing our experience of the world into question, such a reality check is most welcome.