This is the story of a certain accessory, even the main accessory of “La Mémoire dans la peau”. From beginning to end of the film, he follows the same route as the protagonists played by Matt Damon and Franka Potente. Hint: the color red.
The art of the horse
Leave no trace. Do not retrace your steps. Change his identity. Here are some of the precepts that Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin who loses his memory, applies to the letter and must understand why he is being hunted, why he is so good at escaping, and who he is. Released in 2002, The memory in the skin celebrates its 20th anniversary and undiminished popularity these years. Considered the opening of a major spy thriller trilogyDoug Liman’s film with Matt Damon and Franka Potente is a singular event that reoriented the genre to which it belongs.
Very serious and serious because its realism obliges it, one can however notice that its authors have slipped into The memory in the skin a fun element, in contradiction with the need not to leave traces. An element that a trained eye may have noticed…
An accessory that Jason and Marie care about
In The memory in the skin, Jason Bourne is fished out injured by bullets in Mediterranean waters by Italian fishermen. Landed in Marseilles with only track a bank account in Switzerland, he goes by train to Zurich. There, he discovers in a chest bearing his name a very suspicious piece of equipment.
In bulk: a pistol, several bundles of foreign currency and a multitude of passports. Dropping the weapon, he then throws the rest of the contents of the chest into a red bag.
Pursued by the Zurich police – he knocked out two cops during the night – he hopes to find refuge at the American embassy. Identified by sound red bag, he escapes from the embassy. He then convinces Marie (Franka Potente) to drive him to Paris. From there, he will then drive her to the countryside to safety, entrusting her with what remains of his money in the red bag at the moment of fleeing – again -, so that she can rebuild her life elsewhere.
You see where we are coming from. This famous red bag, while Jason Bourne had a thousand times the opportunity to get rid of it, follows the main characters along their route in The memory in the skin. Once the bag is in the hands of Marie, who leaves for good, Jason Bourne then returns to Paris.
After having violently put an initial end to the hunt led by his former superiors, we find him several months later in Greece, in Mykonos. There, he enters a scooter rental shop, run by Marie. Surprise, on the wall of his shop, transformed into a flowerpot: the red bag.
A bag today owned by Adam Savage (MythBusters)
It is impossible for the continued reappearance of this accessory in The memory in the skin either a coincidence. It is therefore consciously that he is thus strolled throughout the film. Consciously at this very point that the film allows itself a mistake. Or, in any case, an ellipse, since Jason Bourne puts it in a locker at the Gare du Nord in Paris but we never see him recover it, before giving it to Marie when she leaves the country house. An amusing and therefore conscious detail on the part of the director, but for what purpose? Mystery.
For the record, one of these bags – there would have been three for the purposes of The memory in the skin – is now in the possession of Adam Savage, host of the show MythBustersspecial effects specialist and passionate about “props“. In addition to the bag itself, he also collected the other accessories contained in it, which he makes an enthusiastic inventory of in the video below.
