Memoria

Jessica can’t sleep. Every night she hears an indistinct noise, a hollow thud that grows increasingly loud and begins to pursue her everywhere, seemingly at random. Jessica, in a superlative and introspective performance from Tilda Swinton, decides to investigate. Thus sets in motion the events of Memoria, which is surely the most unique cinematic experience one can have this year. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest – whom I shall refer to by his affectionate nickname “Joe” from this moment on – is a patient meditation on sound and memory, and their intricate connection. As such, it almost demands listening more than watching; this absolutely must be seen (and heard) in a theatre, where being part of a profoundly hushed audience during its many silences is inimitable.

The Thai filmmaker, in his first work as an expatriate, mirrors his own uncertainties through Jessica, a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her ill sister in Bogotá. Reality becomes less perceptible as the film progresses, with one of her friends she had believed dead for years being perfectly healthy, then another’s very existence being put in question; at one point, she tentatively plants her foot down on a pavestone, as if in doubt over the tangibility of the ground itself. A symphony of car alarms in an early scene initially appears incongruous, until Jessica notices one going off in the car park outside the hospital, nearly an hour later into the film. In this sense Joe invites viewer participation, granting plenty of time through his trademark still camerawork, letting us reach back into our own hazy memory in a deftly expressionistic touch. A lengthy sequence wherein Jessica attempts to recreate the noise with a musician is deeply absorbing, as we try to remember it alongside her; a suspiciously similar sound is heard when a bus engine misfires, raising the possibility that perhaps its source is more banal than one might expect. The scene with the musician, as well as an utterly spellbinding climax that I will refrain from discussing, reflect the artistic process, and an impotent attempt to meaningfully communicate some shared experience. Joe certainly comes close to that goal with this very film, though interpreting it all will still yield entirely personal results. At the very least, Memoria captures the ambiguity and singularity of memory, all while building to a deafening silence that is unlike anything one may ever see at the cinema. That’s more than enough, if you ask me.

Chris Mantafounis

Memoria as memory + euphoria; the sensations that the maverick Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has always conjured, and his latest film exists in this vein. In that horribly cliched way, it is an experience rather than a film, like a very thrilling slow-mo installation - fitting, perhaps, as our central character goes through something that couldn’t really be called a story. Jessica (Tilda Swinton) wakes up one day to a vast, echoing, boom: a sleep paralysis nightmare, or some local industrial work? She continues to go about her life and hears it more, apparently the only one who can.

Investigating the sound takes Jessica to a recording studio, as if recreating the sound would rid her of its haunting: but the challenge of describing it is hard enough. Later, she heads to the country and stumbles upon a man who tells her that he remembers everything. Sincerely, he explains that he can’t leave his home, because too many experiences would build up and overwhelm him. Weerasethakul protracts a scene of him scaling fish for what feels like eternity - convincing us viewers that such quotidian events really could accumulate to a sensory overload.

I have often struggled with the rarified term ‘psychogeography’ but it finally clicked for me in this film: Jessica’s odyssey through archaeology and excavation seems to release a tragic sense-memory otherwise embedded in the landscape around her. Previously Weerasethakul has explored the comfort of reincarnation through jungle spirits, talking animals and deathbed visions of past lives, but there is something more troubling and searching in Memoria. From a simple, unknowable sound, an extraordinary aural history is unleashed, and its payload truly has to be felt in a cinema.

Max King