Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film Memoria was a perfectly serene way to begin a day of festival going (especially following the previous evening's screening of Phil Tippet's less-than-serene Mad God). Given the recent news that Memoria will not receive a DVD or streaming release any time soon, the director opting instead for the film to live a one-screen-at-a-time existence indefinitely, I feel fortunate to have seen it with a large, mostly appreciative audience. Weerasethakul is a filmmaker I greatly admire, and I applaud his attempt to allow the film to exist more as a cinematic exhibit, especially since it plays more like a museum piece than any of his previous feature films (that is, outside of his actual work of experimental pieces designed specifically for museum exhibition). Weerasethakul has stated: "For Memoria, [the] cinema experience is crucial or maybe the only way. Let’s embrace the darkness and dream, one at a time."
The Thai director's emphasis on "cinema as dream" is a defining characteristic of his work, and while that may suggest something like traditional surrealist imagery, Weerasethakul's cinema is more dreamlike in it's stillness, duration, and control than any sort of surrealist abandon or unexpected juxtaposition. Yet, Memoria contains some fairly unexpected elements in it's final passages that I'll leave for the viewer to discover, and Weerasethakul's first major film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), does indeed borrow from the Surrealist idea of the "exquisite corpse" in it's construction, so there are significant ties with that experimental genre to his work. Shorts like Nimit (2007) also show a surrealist sense of play, at times looking like entirely unguided, hand-held video work that challenges anything most would consider traditionally cinematic.
I'm not sure Weerasethakul is too worried about audience members drifting into sleep during Memoria, perhaps filling in the long takes with their own dream imagery, or not being able to distinguish the act of dreaming with their eyes closed from dreaming with their eyes open. Late in the film, the central character of Jessica (Tilda Swinton), encounters a man scaling fish. The have a conversation about television and the types of shows he might be missing without one, which feels like an alien conversation near a Colombian stream outside of his small, powerless shack. Jessica is on a journey to track a particular sound that haunts her consciousness--a deep and earthy booming sound that simultaneously haunts and guides her throughout the film--and perhaps this man has heard the mysterious sound, as well. Earlier in the film she has consulted a sound engineer named Hernán to attempt a recreation of this sound, which apparently only Jessica can hear.. The search for this sound constitutes the entire narrative trajectory, and leads Jessica through a meandering course of action that includes encounters with her ailing sister and local archeologists, and eventually to the man scaling fish, also named Hernán. Is this an older version of the Hernán we met earlier? Has Jessica time travelled somehow? Have we? Indeed, our sense of time has been altered by Weerasethakul's adeptness with duration and rhythm, which is a huge part of the magical quality that compels us back to his work. Jessica sits beside the older Hernán--I believe she asks him to nap as she sits next to him (is the person next to me napping? Am I?)--and a still, medium shot of Hernán laid out horizontally across the screen proceeds as Hernán naps with eyes open (are our eyes open or closed?). What connection to the universe are these two characters sharing?
It may take another viewing or two to begin to decipher the connection between Jessica and Hernán, between Swinton and Weerasethakul (Joe, she calls him), and between these dual auteurs and their exploration of Colombia, but I'm not sure the film will draw me back to it the way his previous films have, particularly Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, or Syndromes and a Century. Memoria is the first film of Weerasethakul's shot away from his homeland, and the first film with an actor like Swinton at the center, so it marks a huge upheaval of familiar elements in his work. This might be why I found the film less impactful than any of his previous works, though I respect the creative journey that both director and actor obviously felt they needed to take. While Swinton has rightly praised the precision of Weerasethakul's frame in interviews, the overall rhythm of the film felt less impactful than usual, less immersive. Likewise, while the collaboration of Swinton and "Joe" seems like an attractive proposition, and is what I suspect is fueling much of the praise for the film, it honestly seems like a mismatch to me. Weerasethakul's actors are typically entirely unlike Swinton--an actor who wants to be looked at, who you can't stop looking at. No knock against Swinton--I think she's remarkable (see: Julia, We Need to Talk About Kevin, A Bigger Splash), even though she might be coming down with an artier case of Nic Cage-itis (see: Snowpiercer, Suspiria), but she's not the actor for Weerasethakul, whose performers often feel previously un-gazed-upon in the best way.
At the time I saw the film at the CIFF, it had already won the Golden Bear--top prize at the festival--so I wondered if perhaps I was missing something. A series of landscape shots that end the film struck me with more meditative impact than anything that proceeded them, so I stay in my seat, taking in the audience around me, trying to hold on to that sense of calm. As the quiet credits roll, I have a look around, a bit lifted, but mostly underwhelmed. Those in front of me have seemed disengaged for quite some time. Some leave swiftly, some linger. The young girl behind me stands transfixed, encounters some friends by chance, and when asked by them what she thought can only muster: "I can't stop crying."
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