Memoir of a Snail

Australia, 2024

Directed by Adam Elliot

(Animated movie)

The film kicks off with a somber note, as lead character Grace Pudel mourns the best friend she had, a feisty and eccentric octogenarian lady, Pinky, whose health has deteriorated fast, falling victim to the Alzheimer’s disease. Sitting on a bench in the small garden of her departed friend, she talks to her favorite pet and starts reminiscing and reflecting on her life.

Still, the title is somehow correct: a defining trait of the unlucky character is her love for snails, extending to wearing constantly a funny beanie with imitations of snails’ distinctive tentacles and eyes. She has hoarded a lot of objects looking like snails and bred many real gastropods – and of course the pet used as a confidant is a lovely snail called Sylvia, which is more busy it seems trying to climb a tree than listening to her owner.

There may be many reasons to Grace Pudel’s love of snails but the main one, actually the only one spelled out, is that her late mother did love them and was even a specialist in the species. But she died in the wake of the difficult birth of her twins, Grace and Gilbert Pudel, with the little girl born premature and with a cleft lip. The first scene has indeed perfectly captured what has been so far the fate of the lead character: an unremitting series of tragedies and troubles big and small, with the biggest, most heartbreaking, turning point occurring after the death of the father, who was a French artist unable to get any success in the native land of his wife and children, became wheelchair-bound after a car crash, and used to be addicted to booze and scratch cards. Spotted by social services and unable to find a foster family ready to welcome both kids together, each as eccentric as the other and both deeply attached to each other, Grace and Gilbert were separated – and both badly struggled to cope with the distance put between them, especially as Gilbert landed in a farming family deeply devout and awfully narrow-minded, rigid, intolerant, the Applebys.

This is not a quiet and rewarding life, and this is not a sunny and lovely land: fitting Grace’s hardship and alienation the 1970s Australia the film depicts looks decidedly drab and rickety, shot with a palette of brown and gray. When posters warn the public to be careful of the sharp edge of billboards, the irony bites right away as those billboards stand in streets where buildings have a decidedly makeshift look as if made by clumsy children. In this uninspiring environment people can swiftly come across as dreadful, or be just nice nonentities. Kids of the elementary school are mean, taunting, even beating, Grace because of her less than perfect looks, while adults are usually a problem, from the medical staff garbling sternly when Grace undergoes a surgery to get rid of her cleft lip – a routine operation that, of course, nearly leads her to death because of a hemorrhage – to the foster parents that she got later and who proved too eager first to boost her self-confidence and morale and then to pursue their kinky sexual pleasures, leaving her alone.

The madcap old lady Grace meets when she is volunteering in a public library is the most comic exception: Pinky would prove the great friend standing by to help her far younger and far more diffident companion, especially when, a young adult, Grace after months of bliss realizes what a deceitful pervert the man who pretended to fall for her and to marry her actually was. In the wider narrative of a separated brethren, Pinky is the polar opposite of Ruth Appleby, Gilbert’s foster mother unwilling to love him but quick to humble him and adamant he fits into the numbing frame her religious and selfish views deem the only acceptable mold. The easygoing and colorful ways of Pinky, her cool habits, her stubborn streak, her real generosity illuminate both Grace and the film while the Applebys stand as the epitome of hypocrisy and cruelty masquerading in righteousness and conformism.

Pinky’s death could have led to another tragedy in the wake of so many bitter pills and so many deaths. But suicide is refused and the brother, thought dead, comes back into the frame, and the phrase is quite fitting since Grace has started at this point a career of filmmaker. The film settles on a traditional, quite rosy happy ending, perhaps too readily but then it is movingly the ultimate celebration of a brotherly bond that proved stronger than any hardship and the reward that a lonely girl so often betrayed or simply buffeted by life deserved to get. It also brings to a conclusion a long struggle to define herself, with spaces pointing to her changing state of mind. The crammed bedroom and living room where she spends most of her life, brimming with snails, guinea pigs, and every kind of objects possible, related to her pets or not (reflecting the messy and bursting space that first appears in the screen and where the titles are ingeniously written on one object after another) eventually give way to the open-air spaces where Grace at long last decides to make a fresh start and burns nearly everything she owes and finally to a cozier and tidier space where she can resume the old habit of reading books along with his brother. This is about redefining a life by acknowledging the importance of letting go and the value of what Pinky expressed ceaselessly, the idea that is that you always need to go forward and to move on and never get ensnared in the past and in habits.

In a moving twist, Grace’s life also reflects the very art used to narrate her story. Her father was first famous for making stop motion pictures and she eventually manages to produce her own stop motion pictures: and a great stop motion pictures “Memoir of a Snail” happens to be, with its weird characters made up of soft modeling material powerfully conveying the physical flaws and fragility of the character but also the depth of their emotions and temperaments (even the most negative) and its imaginative props and details. This clay has a real touch of magic – and this mojo owes nothing to computer-generated imagery, standing as a moving example of pure handcraft, tactile and tangible.

The deeper sense of the film is also spelled out by the indispensable Pinky: to get sense of one’s life you need to look backwards, and most of the film is a rigorous series of flashbacks, but to live truly you need to forge ahead, and the film not only rushes to the happy ending with zest and is constantly underpinned by a terrific energy, a vibrant desire of telling a sad story with flair and wit – it cannot be understated how really funny it is. The sophomore feature of a director whose works are few (Adam Elliot has only eight directing credits in 2024 even as he is 52), “Memoir of a Snail” shows a command of the stop motion technique that is not just awesome and delightfully original but wonderfully adapted to the struggle of a character who is a perennial victim but finds how to master her fate, showing that difference and difficulties can be overcome.