Tilda Swinton in "Memoria." (Courtesy NEON) The film’s extraordinary sound design amplifies the ambient noises to levels I’ve never heard before in a motion picture, forcing us to focus intently on birdsong, running streams, traffic sounds and car alarms that serve as urban crickets. He doesn’t move the camera, locking it down for long takes that run for minutes on end, allowing our eyes to roam around the screen instead of directing us where to look. The source of the sounds is surprisingly (and quite amusingly) revealed in the end, but Weerasethakul isn’t telling us what to make of anything along the way. The very fabric of reality seems to be slipping away from Swinton, who is seen misremembering friends and relatives, interacting with characters we’re later told were never there. In a sense, it’s like an aural “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” with weird noises instead of mashed potatoes.īut it’s also so much more than that, pondering the fundamental unknowability of nature and everyday mysteries we take for granted.
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It seems she’s the only person who can hear them, and the movie follows her quest to at first replicate the sounds and then later track down their source, increasingly obsessed and venturing all the way into the jungles of the Amazon. We’d be worried about her if she wasn’t.) It’s positively plotty compared to his previous work, starring Swinton as a woman who is startled by strange, deafeningly loud thudding noises at unexpected moments. (Of course, Tilda Swinton is in this picture. It’s being billed as his first English language film - though a lot of the dialogue is in Spanish - and his first time working with an international movie star. “ Memoria” is Weerasethakul’s most accessible movie yet, which isn’t exactly saying much. For some viewers, these films can be a form of torture. People have been known to have religious experiences during his pictures. But more important are the feelings that they leave you with, the unexpected places inside your head that Weerasethakul takes you to with his quiet contemplations and unexplainable passages of beauty and grace. I suppose you could probably talk about what happens in films like “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” or “Syndromes and a Century,” sort of. The Thai minimalist’s mesmerizing features are far more interested in atmosphere than events, their meanings elusive and open to audience interpretations. Some directors make movies, Apichatpong Weerasethakul casts spells. Amid the modern-day alienation and abstraction, she ultimately finds a profound connection, a startling release and the discovery that her dislocation, grief and even memories are not hers alone, if they are hers at all.Tilda Swinton in director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film "Memoria." (Courtesy NEON) Political subtext and past traumas leak into the present and are inseparable from the metaphysical just as Jessica’s interior and exterior worlds become indistinguishable from one another. Drenched in a dense sonic atmosphere, this cinema-world revels in both the magical and the mundane. Along with these glitches, she encounters curses, apparitions, myths and the unknown, not with panic or disbelief but with a kind of obsessive and open-minded questioning-just as the Weerasethakul viewer should be positioned, as each uncanny turn opens up questions and doubts about the scene before. A man she spoke to suddenly doesn’t exist. Yet the science seems not quite capable of measuring the precise dimensions of what Jessica is accessing. The exploration of this sound leads her to doctors and audio engineers, and, seemingly tangentially, archaeologists uncovering ancient human remains at a construction site. Her unpredictable trajectory is initiated by an unsettling, loud bang of unknown origin.
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Here, the shape-shifting and otherworldly Tilda Swinton melancholically slides into Memoria’s multiverse as Jessica, a Scottish botanist visiting her sister who’s ill in a hospital in Colombia. Until now, he had never even strayed from the area where he grew up, and none of his films ever starred a Westerner, much less a very famous one. In addition to its alternative distribution strategy, the film is also a break from the director’s all-Thai productions. Memoria is a film like no other, even none other of Weerasethakul’s. Instant gratification and ever-flowing media streams are now taken for granted, and in Memoria nothing can be taken for granted. These defined occurrences, like his films, involve patience, waiting and transitory, mysterious, life-changing phenomena. In fact, it will never be shown on the small screen. As his latest film whirls around the country on a kind of perpetual “tour” rather than one brief, simultaneous release, Apichatpong Weerasethakul is emphatic about the need to see Memoria communally in a theater, with its undistracting darkness and enveloping sound.