Memoria: A Thai Master’s Latest Featuring Tilda Swinton and A Big Bang
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Memoria, the latest film by the Apichatpong Weerasethakul, begins with a bang, a big metallic thump.
Strictly speaking, the bang doesn’t happen right away but after we’ve spent some long minutes of staring into a dark room with a faint light through a window, we suddenly hear the noise. At the sound, a woman rises from the bed in the room and stands in silhouette at the window to see what could have caused the sound. In the parking lot, a bunch of cars simultaneously set off their alarms in chorus, like machines singing praises to their robot god.
There are elements both familiar and new in Weerasethakul’s Memoria, the first film made outside his home country, set in Colombia, with dialogue in English and Spanish. The winner of a jury prize at Cannes made a lot of last year’s prestigious top-10 lists (Sight and Sound, Film Comment) which is expected from celebrated artist and filmmaker of Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century and the Palme D’Or winner, Uncle Boonmee who Remembers His Past Lives, even if it is a somewhat less astonishing film than its predecessors.
The visual style and motifs are familiar. A stationary camera in a wide frame, light shining through panels of windows, jungles, and caves, along with the thematic interest of Buddhistic ideas of illusion, memory, reincarnation, and the mysterious forces at work behind the theatrical scrim of everyday life. As we have seen before, the director’s sense of high seriousness is punctuated by moments of playful humour.
What’s new is a distinct protagonist, a woman named Jessica, played by an internationally known Tilda Swinton. She is always a singular presence, elegant and otherworldly, like a sleepwalking unicorn. (The director says the name was inspired by Jessica Holland, the comatose character in Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 classic, I Walked with a Zombie).
There’s even a reasonably followable narrative here. We learn, incrementally, that Jessica is a British expat and an orchid dealer who lives in Medellín but is visiting Bogotá to see her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who is in hospital with a mysterious respiratory disease, which she thinks may have been caused by a dog that cursed her.
Notable here is the complexity of the sound design. There are recurrent moments of the ominous noise, which apparently only Jessica can hear (I started to think of Herman Melville’s “universal thump”). There’s also a constant low-level thrum of traffic, background voices and music, punctuated with dramatic moments of silence.
Jessica’s encounters with other characters have a picaresque quality, or a hero’s journey involving mysterious encounters with each occasion offering new clues to the larger mystery.
First, Jessica meets a male poet, who has a fascination with “the perfume of decay,” for a coffee in a public square. She goes to the local university to seek understanding of the Big Noise and meets a sound engineer and musician, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) who tries to simulate on his computer the sound she describes as “like a big ball of concrete that falls into a metal well which is surrounded by seawater.”
By chance at the university, she encounters and befriends French archaeologist Agnes (Jeanne Balibar) who is reassembling the bones of a six-year-old girl, who seems to have died in a ritual killing. In another sequence she goes to a place that sells refrigerators that can “de-age” orchids — “In this cabinet, time stops” says the saleswoman.
On the invitation of the young musician, she makes a trip to another town to look at refrigerators. They seem to teeter on the edge of a dalliance when he unexpectedly offers to buy a flower refrigerator for her, but she declines his offer and walks away.
Later, when she goes to seek out Hernán at the studio, no one in the studio knows who she’s talking about. As she wanders through the building, she joins a crowd that has formed in a room to listen to a musical jazz jam. Instead of watching the concert, we watch her face instead.
Her sister is suddenly better, and she joins her and her family at a restaurant for dinner, where her sister describes her new job, studying a tribe of people in the Amazon forest who believe they can use ancestral magic to keep outsiders away. While dining on the osso buco, Jessica hears the mysterious boom again, and realizes that only she can hear it. Is she going crazy or is the universe sending her a message?
Afterward, Jessica goes on a long drive away from the city, visits Agnes at a site where a construction tunnel has run into an archeological site. She visits a rural woman doctor, asking for Xanax, and confessing that she “never” sleeps. The doctor, who is reluctant to give her medication, recommends she follow Jesus and Dali, and appreciate the beauty of life.
In the film’s last third, the pace slows down and the mysterious elements become more heightened and obscure. Jessica goes for a walk in the mountains where, by a stream, she meets a middle-aged man, also named Hernán (Elkin Diaz), scaling a fish.
He explains that he never travels because he can remember everything, including events before he was born, and he’s anxious to limit his experience. In contrast to Jessica, he can sleep easily but never dreams.
By the riverbank, and later in his house over a drink of homemade liquor, the two of them are engaged in long slow dance of revelations, a mind-meld in which she begins to experience his painful childhood memories. He employs a muddled technological metaphor to describe their moving interaction: “You are reading my memory,” he tells her. “I’m like a hard disk. And somehow you are an antenna.”
Time feels distended during this two-hand interior sequence, which, depending on your taste is either mysteriously profound or excessively drawn-out. But there’s a narrative circle that eventually forms here.
The film that began with a bang finally ends with a pop, with a sci-fi revelation in the final minutes which is likely to draw gasps from audiences. I suspect that the jack-in-the-box ending is deliberately silly, a mood lightener and a way to dispel the film’s overall solemnity.
But I also couldn’t help but be reminded of how much comic book blockbusters and genre cinema employ these same themes — time-travel, the multiverses, the blurring of the line between life and death, and the plasticity of the material world.
Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.
Memoria. Directed and written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Starring Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Giménez Cacho, and Agnes Brekke. Now screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.