Inspired by the 1985 true story of a drug runner’s plane crash, missing cocaine, and the black bear that ate it, this wild dark comedy finds an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500- pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of cocaine and gone on a coke-fueled rampage for more blow … and blood.

Plot

Undergoing a messy divorce from a husband and daughter tired of her continuously overwrought emotional states,Sarah Lawson visits her brother Robert Harmon, an alcoholic playboy and writer who is in a relationship with Susan, a professional singer, although he carefully avoids any real emotional commitment to anyone. Robert is visited by his ex-wife, who forces him to take care of their eight-year-old son, whom he has never met, for 24 hours.

Robert’s son is terrified by the hedonistic, decadent, womanizing world of his father and begs to be taken home following an overnight trip to Las Vegas filled with gambling and prostitutes. After dropping him off, Robert is beaten up by the boy’s stepfather, after which his son testifies his love for Robert.

Fleeing the scene, Robert returns home to take care of his sister, his “best friend.” Sarah tries with some success to curb the nihilistic self-destruction of Robert’s life and simultaneously deal with her own depression and divorce. She gets him some animals hope he can give his love to them and Robert struggles between his intense desire to protect his sister and the challenge of accepting her freedom as the necessary cost of love. Finally, after a bizarre dream of being in an opera with her husband and daughter, Sarah feels ready to resume her life and possibly even get her family back, or not. She walks away from the house in the middle of a storm as Robert looks on kind of sadly. He hallucinates that one of the dogs she gave him has turned into a naked man and is waving at him.

Si le nom de Jean-Pierre Mocky est le plus souvent associé à la comédie caustique et bouffonne, son autre genre de prédilection fut sans conteste le polar. Un type de récit obéissant à des codes et des règles différents, mais permettant au réalisateur d’approfondir ses thèmes récurrents. Ainsi de la vision en coupe d’une microsociété renfermée sur elle-même, à la parole étouffée par des secrets inavouables, ou encore son obsession pour l’enfance violentée. Noir comme le souvenir lui donne également l’occasion d’un exercice de style qui semble renouveler sa mise en scène, en s’essayant à une ébauche de giallo, transplanté dans la froideur d’une petite ville suisse. À ce sous-genre italien du film policier, il emprunte le recours à des couleurs vives, à des meurtres graphiques et un certain sadisme teinté d’horreur, voire de fantastique. Bien que réalisé à une époque où sa carrière et ses budgets commencent à décliner, Mocky parvient encore à s’attacher les services de stars inattendues dans son univers, à l’instar de Jane Birkin, habitée en mère traumatisée, et Sabine Azéma, en bonne copine comme échappée d’un film d’Alain Resnais, mais aussi des regrettés Jean-François Stévenin et Benoît Régent, dont ce fut le dernier film.

Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter called the film “low-tech, high-tension”, writing that “The lonely, uncanny and sometimes unthinkingly violent world of childhood is explored with chilling candor and exceptional skill”. Jessica Kiang of Variety praised the performances of the child actors as well as the film’s atmosphere, calling the film “both a satisfying genre exercise and a minute observation of the process by which young children acquire morality.” Sight & Sound‘s Anton Bitel wrote that the film “uses its genre frame to show the connectedness, curiosity and cruelty of its young characters, and also asks whether the inevitable loss of innocence at this age is a slate that can ever simply be cleaned.”