Film Review: Memoria
Images courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s glacially slow-paced affair Memoria prioritises a sensory experience for its audience over telling a conventional story.
Tellingly, its production company Neon is only releasing the film in one theatre at a time for a week each. Thus, the viewers that attend any given screening are the only people experiencing the film in the world at that moment.
Reflecting on the way one watches this film is as equally important to the viewing experience as what the film contains. And much like its release strategy, the film refuses to make a splash. Rather, its ambience reflects a still and drifting mist that has a soulful and regenerative impact.
That description is sufficiently vague, so I will elaborate.
Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is a Scottish woman newly living in Medellin, Colombia and caring for her hospitalised sister with an unspecified respiratory complaint. Suddenly, she is jolted awake during the night by a loud wallop. It has a deep rumble and rings in the ears briefly. It cannot be unheard. Jessica investigates around the house to no avail.
The noise re-occurs frequently throughout the film, with Jessica searching far and wide for its source. However, she is the only one that can hear it, and as a result, Jessica bears the burden of this constant interference to her sanity.
The recurring auditory motif transcends the film almost into the essayistic genre in how far it deconstructs the way a minor incident can play a major role in shaping one’s life choices. These bangs are only audible to Jessica and the audience; therefore, the film sharpens our senses to pay close attention to frequencies and vibrations of diegetic sound (and even sounds around us in the cinema) that in other films would go unnoticed.
Under the viewer’s nose, the noise appears to transplant a new reality into Jessica’s life without her realising it. At a family dinner, Jessica is certain a family friend passed away a year ago, only to be emphatically corrected by her father and sister that they are still alive. Furthermore, she investigates the noise with a sound engineer Hernan, but when she seeks his advice later on at his workplace, he apparently no longer exists.
The first film he has made outside of his native Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s own unease in a foreign locale is perhaps reflected through Jessica. In a later scene, Jessica meets an older man, also named Hernan, on the outskirts of a Colombian jungle. He claims he has never left his hometown as he can perfectly remember everything and leaving would be too overwhelming. During this conversation, a full soundtrack of life’s sounds occurs beyond the room’s windows, with thunderous rain, to monkeys howling and children playing. Do these sonic etchings symbolise the inescapable malady of discovering oneself within an unfamiliar world? Probably not.
Seldom has a film gone so far over my head. However, Memoria illuminates feelings of displacement, existential uncertainty and spiritual morays that are deeply disorienting but thought-provoking.
Memoria is screening at Cinema Nova for a limited time from Thursday 7th of April. For tickets and more info, click here.