Him stopping eating apples was just wishing for the memory loss. There are many clues that support the fact he was just trying to escape his current life. First being he manages to find his way into the new life program after hearing about it.

But he just could not abide with the program ultimately and goes back home. If you recall, there is no good prognosis for the memory loss disorder so he would not have been able to recall anything even in little bits.

What makes this film so great is the dialogue we are having about it. It’s been a while since I watched it but I remember it clearly because it was such a great film. So few of those lately!

And maybe I was wrong about the car crash thing (which I thought was just a bit of humor about not remembering how to brake) and that was indeed the task. The program directors did indeed become more bold and idiosyncratic in their prescribed tasks, haha.

I may have to re watch!!

The biking and driving tasks, however, are indeed to help muscle memory so that patients can regain mobility (and by the way, the driving task does not involve purposefully crashing into a tree; Aris and Anna just forgot how to brake successfully).

The purpose of the tasks as I see it is to get people to have various life experiences so that they don’t just isolate. And by doing the tasks, they can discover things they like, some of which they may have never tried in their past lives. This helps them to form new lives.

All in all, it’s a touching and fascinating movie!

To me, he has to have had actual memory loss because he stops eating apples when he hears they are good for one’s memory. Over the course of the film, he regains some memories (the dog’s name, knowing that he didn’t have a good relationship with the dog’s owner, his old apartment number) and then, most importantly, remembers that he lost his wife. This is deeply painful for him. When he hears that apples are good for one’s memory, he stops eating them because he doesn’t want to remember more about the woman he loved and then lost. The more he remembers about her, the stronger his feeling of grief. At the film’s end, he decides to stop running away from the pain of his past and starts eating apples again. He chooses to face his grief and remember more about himself and the love of his life.

If he never lost his memory at all, there would be no real reason for him to stop eating apples when he hears they are good for one’s memory, because his memory would essentially be constant. Stepping away from his life by purposely being in the program would not actually make him forget his wife. If someone loses a loved one, no amount of vacations or retreats will cause them to legitimately forget who their loved one was. So, if he never actually lost his memory, I don’t think that learning that apples are good for one’s memory would cause him to suddenly abandon his favorite food.