Tangles – Durcheinander

The many Alzheimer’s films of recent years only rarely found truly convincing images for the process of forgetting. “Tangles - Durcheinander” is quite different, perhaps because animation can be the most consistent medium for it: a line can be erased. A face can lose its contours long before the person disappears. For young, queer Sarah, who lives in San Francisco in the late 1990s, drawing is at first, however, the promise of a great future. Her first illustrations get noticed, and a new love grows with Donimo. But at her parents’ home in Maine she notices that her mother Midge is no longer the same. The Alzheimer’s diagnosis forces Sarah back into a family that deals with the incomprehensible in very different ways.

Canadian Leah Nelson worked for ten whole years on her debut, an adaptation of Sarah Leavitt’s autobiographical graphic novel. Her hand-drawn black-and-white images seem almost casual at first, but suddenly colours break in, spaces shift, bodies fall apart. A staircase stretches into infinity. Memory is not explained here but made tangible as loss. Nelson stays resolutely with the daughter, her feeling of being overwhelmed, her anger and that painful humour with which families sometimes endure the unbearable. “Tangles” is not the next sentimental illness drama; rather, the film is a moving work about memory and the gradual process of saying goodbye.