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For anyone wondering if Memoria, slow-cinema master Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first film in English (and Spanish) and his first made outside his native Thailand, would be a radical departure, the answer is a decisive no. The director’s abiding fascination with dreams, nature, time, solitude and of course memory flows like liquid through this lyrical enigma, which maintains his characteristic aesthetic purity of long static takes, meditative pacing and intimacy negotiated from a coolly scrutinizing distance. Starring Tilda Swinton as a foreigner in Colombia who becomes obsessed with tracing a sound that invades her sleep, this is a sensory experience that unfolds beyond narrative, often in empty spaces and hushed solemnity.
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Weerasethakul won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. His best films, which also include Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century, and his most recent, 2015’s Cemetery of Splendor, are elliptical visions whose margins conceal biting sociopolitical perspectives on Thailand’s present and past.
Memoria
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Agnes Brekke, Jerónimo Barón, Constanza Guitérrez
Director-screenwriter: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The writer-director’s wander through the cities, sierras and jungles of Colombia doesn’t match the cultural specificity that gives his Thai films such hypnotic power, and it perhaps remains even more impervious to rigid interpretation. But as it washes over you, Memoria excavates the country’s bloody history of violence, the fears of its people, and the topographic trauma of earthquakes and mudslides that make the land itself a vessel for memory.
Conventional notions of plot in a Weerasethakul movie are seldom the point, but here goes anyway: Swinton plays Jessica, a botanist from the U.K. who specializes in orchids, in Bogotá visiting her hospitalized sister, Karen (Agnes Brekke). In the film’s opening moments, Jessica is jolted out of slumber in the pre-dawn hours by a loud bang, a single thud she mistakenly assumes must be from construction work on a neighboring property. A mutual friend connects her with a young sound engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), who draws from a file of movie audio effects to help her describe what she heard — “like a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater; it’s like a rumble from the core of the earth.”
The nature of Karen’s illness remains unclear, but in a dream she recalls seeing a dog injured by a car and left to die, which she took to a vet and then forgot due to preoccupations about her own health. She wonders if the dog cursed her. Later, when Karen is released from hospital, Jessica goes to dinner with her sister and the latter’s partner, academic and poet Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho). Karen belongs to an experimental theater company developing a piece about an Amazon jungle tribe called “The Invisible People,” whose elders are believed to keep outsiders away with incantations. Again, she wonders if one of those spells is making her sick.
Even while sitting at dinner, Jessica hears the same startling sound over and over, though neither of her companions appears to notice it. She visits art galleries, which are nothing if not vaults of memory, and walks the city streets, stopping in a public square where she hears the noise again.
She has an illuminating encounter with Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archeologist studying ancient human remains disinterred during construction on a tunnel. The skull of a young girl has a hole that Agnes explains was probably drilled into it to release bad spirits, in a sense what Jessica is attempting to do by seeking out the noise that triggered her insomnia. She travels out of town past roadside military checkpoints to visit Agnes at the excavation site, still looking for answers in her broken Spanish.
But those only come when she follows a creek in a nearby mountain village and meets an older man also named Hernán (Elkin Díaz). In Weerasethakul’s conceptual world, he appears to be the same person seen earlier. He explains that he has never traveled nor watched movies, TV or seen news in any format because there are already enough stories and he remembers everything. He picks up a rock and shares the past it contains. He also tells her that his kind never dreams, demonstrating by falling into a motionless sleep on the creek bank with his eyes open.
Their conversation continues in Hernán’s home, where he offers Jessica a glass of liquor he makes himself that appears to be aguardiente. “This stuff brings me close to what you call dreams,” he tells her. When she begins telling a story of a frightening childhood incident involving her mother, Hernán tells her she’s actually reading his memories, like an antenna.
She weeps quietly as she hears storms, rain and tremors of the past intertwined with a tangle of stories, including a ghostly replay of the one Hernán previously extracted from the rock, about a man being beaten and robbed. In a typically surreal Weerasethakul touch, Jessica witnesses an occurrence that introduces a brief sci-fi or supernatural element, which would appear to explain the origin of the sound she’s been chasing.
Her emotional response is quietly moving in Swinton’s otherwise muted performance. Whether audiences will share the character’s clarity depends on how willing they are to tune in to the director’s singular wavelength. Memoria is a challenging film that requires work, and its somnolent rhythms, particularly during an early morning screening at the end of a busy festival, pushed this critic to the brink of sleep a couple times, adding to its dreamlike effect. But that’s somehow in keeping with a haunting contemplation of the porous walls separating personal from collective memory. The beautiful closing landscape shots of the jungles and mountains suggest that memory extends even beyond the human dimension.
Acquired by Neon for the U.S., the film won’t expand Weerasethakul’s following, but admirers will find it an imaginative, thematically and stylistically cohesive addition to his distinctive output.
Full credits
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Production companies: Kick the Machine, Burning, in association with Illumination Films, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, Piano
Distributor: Neon
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Agnes Brekke, Jerónimo Barón, Constanza Guitérrez
Director-screenwriter: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Producers: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Diana Bustamante, Simon Field, Keith Griffiths, Charles de Meaux, Michael Weber, Julio Chavezmontes
Executive producer: Tilda Swinton
Director of photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production designer: Angélica Perea
Costume designer: Catherine Rodríguez
Music: César López
Editor: Lee Chatametikool
Sound designer: Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr
Casting: Jorge Forero
Sales: Match Factory
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