Arrival - Why doesn't Louise remember the phone call?

The nonlinear perception thing gets tricky but I think Louise experiences those future memories more like flashes or dreams until she actually lives through them - so the phone call memory only becomes "real" once she's in that moment at the gala

She doesn't remember every future event of her life and the events come to her memory sporadically >Why is Shang exposition dumping and giving her his phone number? This seems like one of those things where he's been told 'You're going to meet this woman and its important you tell her this and give her your private number' We can assume Louise told him that on the initial phone call

Its been a bit and correct me if im wrong but Louise isn't seeing the future there. She finally understands the Aliens and she is experiencing all of time at the same time non linearly. So in the movie, she hadn't called the General yet, but then jumps to the future Louise and the General telling her that she called him and she told him on that call the instructions he is relaying to her now. Then she has the number and the message she needed to tell the General in the past to set up that encounter. She doesn't remember it because she hadn't done it yet. She has her fingers in multiple timelines at the same time

It's like a language. Just because you studied Eye-talian for a few months doesn't mean you know all the ins and outs and have a fully integrated understanding of what everything - including intonation, rhythm, colloquialisms, etc means. You're gonna fumble it, and use it imprecisely at times. Louise is only just starting to grasp the non-linear experience and gaining some control of it, but she's not fluent. So she was able to 'find' the right moment, but had to play out the future memory in real time to get the answer she was looking for. I can see how General Shang put 2 and 2 together. While he is clearly cautious and conservative in military policy, he is never suggested to be an iditio. Firstly, he would have overheard her on the phone arguing with others about the phone call and known she was doing so against orders. Given that even Halpern didn't have Shang's number, I imagine it's a number Shang controls for just his inner circle. But Shang at the future party would understand by then that Louise experiences time non-linearly, so showing her his phone number and quoting his wife's dying words equip her with the knowledge to convince him in the past. And making that connection would make him one of the smartest characters in the movie. I think Shang would have studied the language, but I don't think he ever integrated it in the way Louise did. So by the time they meet, he understands its effects, but never experienced them himself. But having said that, the language only unlocks the prescience once you start learning it. Louise didn't always know the general's number *until* the end of the film when it - according to the hypothesis mentioned in the film - had sufficiently rewired her brain. And since Louise was the first one to do it, no one else had achieved that level of fluency yet.

>If Louise is >!seeing the future, why does her future self not remember that she made the most important call in history? I thought maybe it's one of those things that the future she see's changes based on her decisions so until she's actually made the call it hasn't happened yet!< but Shang is aware of it so she should be too. I interpreted this as more of a "soliloquy moment" for the benefit of us, the viewers. The *real* surprise was >!Lousie-in-present experiencing her first *clear, lucid* "memory" of the future,!< and they showed this by having>! Louse-in-the-memory act shocked at what she was "remembering" even as she spoke to the ambassador on the phone.!< In truth, >!Lousie-in-the-future would not have been surprised, because she would have had all the time between "present" and "future" to prepare for that event.!< The facial acting (or "mugging") by Mrs Adams was for our benefit, not something that "really happened." >Why is Shang exposition dumping and giving her his phone number? Avoiding the bootstrap paradox. >!She needs to know the number in order to use it, but she can't know the number in the future if she was never told what it was in the past.!< The alien language >!changes the way people perceive time,!< but it does not actually >!violate cause and effect. You can't learn something you never knew by "remembering" a future moment where you had already learned it, there must at some point in between be a moment where you learned the information.!<

If you dream about the future, your brain is going to treat it as garbage and you likely won't remember it.  Once it happens you'll get deja vu and be like holy shit I dreamed that.  

Arrival is maybe my favorite movie, and a big part of the reasons why can--I think--help partially answer your questions. The first time someone watches Arrival, they assume Louise lost her daught before the movie ever started and she was having flashbacks to her daughter as she learned the Heptapod language. But then the amazing twist hits and you realize those weren't flashbacks at all and her daughter hasn't been born. The twist is great, but why I love the movie so much is that I think it's better each time I rewatch it because it works so well if you know the twist. Arrival, unlike a lot of twist movies, plays it honest with the audience to the point where, once you rewatch a few times knowing the twist, you'll start wondering how you EVER though those were flashbacks in the first place. The movie makes it very clear that those visions of a little girl come as she deciphers the language, and Amy Adams plays it honest...she plays those scenes like someone baffled and confused by what she's seeing, not someone remembering their dead daughter. That's a long way of saying that through the movie, Louise slowly develops the grasp of nonlinear time as she learns the language, BUT she doesn't know what's happening. She doesn't know who the girl is or why she's seeing what she's seeing. It isn't until the end when she is fully exposed to the entire language that she actually understands what she's experiencing. Consequently, the reason she isn't aware of the call until the end is that she isn't fully aware of what's happening to her until the end. The scene before the phone call is when she can finally live with nonlinearity and understand it, but that doesn't happen until right before the phone call (to show you she finally grasps the language and can control it, she has the line, "I know why my husband left me"). So yeah...there was no way she could know about the call until that part of the movie because she still hadn't fully immersed herself in Heptapod and was only seeing flashes of the future, while not even sure they were the future. \#2 is dicier, but it makes more sense if you've read Ted Chiang's story Arrival is based on (the two are quite different but also share a ton). The movie obviously can't get into this because it would have to be an entirely separate movie, but time is fixed in that world and cannot be changed. Louise experiences the future as what has to happen, but she doesn't try to change it (the movie changed how the daughter died because if they'd stuck with the book Villeneuve would have had to explain how time works, which would have dragged the movie to a screeching halt). So...Louise had the conversation with General Chang, and she always HAD to have that conversation because it's simply what's supposed to happen (it's a causal universe with arguably no free will, though the book explains it beautifully). And if the conversation with Chang HAD to happen and succeed, then that meant that the later conversation with Chang where he told her what she would say in the past HAD to happen that way because it had already happened from Louise perspective, and the past nor the future can be changed. I hope that makes some sense. I'm not sure I'm explaining it well! I highly recommend the Ted Chiang short story "Story of Your Life." I love both Chiang's story and Arrival equally, and they're great companion pieces because the movie is structured completely differently and has different plot points. The main thing I always tell everyone is they need to watch the movie BEFORE reading the story, and you've already watched the movie, so you're good to go :)

Your question is about "seeing the future" and an assumption that one thing happens before another The reason the movie is about a linguist is to explore the concept that linear time is a constraint bound by our use of language. The alien language isn't about learning to see the future, it's about time not being linear. Her "flash-forward" to the general giving her his phone number and his wife's dying words isn't a memory