Memoria

Lost & Sound

Memoria
Colombia/Thailand/France/Germany/
Mexico/Qatar/United Kingdom/
China/Switzerland 2021
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Sovereign Film Distribution

Warning: Possibly very slight spoilers...
I’m not sure if there are, to be honest.

I’ve not seen a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul before and this one, Memoria, which marks his first English language film (although half of it is in Spanish), deals with a character called Jessica, played by Tilda Swinton (one of the greatest living actresses), as she wanders around bits of Spain and Columbia in search of the answer to the mystery which is haunting her.

Now I’m going to try and write this review without any spoilers which is going to be both bizarrely difficult and easy to attempt in equal measure but, ultimately, having spent over two hours of my time watching the film, trying to tell an audience what it’s actually about may prove something like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I will say straight up that the movie is shot in that beautiful, languid, relaxed and simple manner I adore, that I might associate with someone like the great Andrei Tarkovsky. Most of the shots are long and there’s not always a lot of movement, if any, within a shot... sometimes for a good few minutes. It takes its time as both Jessica and the audience is hearing, every now and again, a fairly distinctive audio thump when nobody else can. The director likes to use the juxtaposition of sounds which aren’t actually this thump to both wrong foot the audience and also establish a difference between the thumps in Jessica’s head and ‘real’ ones. There’s also no underscore on the picture to distract from the sound design, which almost takes on the personae of being its own character in the film (if that’s not too pretentious a thing to say... although I’m sure a few reviewers might take this tack). So any music heard in the film is diegetic as in, an on screen source for any melody is clearly established.

The problem with the film for me is something I half saw coming from very early on in the narrative actually... if this could be called a narrative... in that I began to think of the main protagonist as being a more malleable screen presence than I think I was, at first, supposed to question. But question it I did and so, when one main character who is helping Jessica build an audio interpretation of the sound she keeps hearing just disappears from everyone’s narrative except hers... I felt myself a little vindicated in my original suspicions. Ditto when her sister, who she has been visiting in hospital but once released, doesn’t remember a conversation that she had with her in bed once she gets out... although considering the nature of the mystery illness which has struck her down, this is partially explainable within a traditional narrative interpretation of events, I think. Her sister's memory seems somewhat questionable anyway.

However, my own discomfort with believing everything put in front of my eyeballs as narrative truth... with good reason it perhaps transpires... wasn’t in anyway comforted by the ending of the movie which everything is leading up to. It also doesn’t help matters when, during the second or third long static shot of the movie, a load of car alarms go off in the city from no visible prompt, helping to re-enforce the notion in the collective mind of the audience that something ‘unseen by many’ is clearly afoot.

But, as I said, the film does work towards an end game and it certainly shows, at least, the source of the sound Jessica is seeing (or possibly two sources, depending on your interpretation) which I can certainly see as being the main clue for various catalogues and listings to label this up as a science fiction movie. That being said, any hopeful revelations on this point are kinda lost in the aftermath of certain statements in a conversation Jessica has with a guy taking up quite a large chunk of the conclusion of the movie. In fact, it becomes clear that not even Jessica is really able to properly comprehend the explanation behind the chain of events that have brought her to this point in the... yeah, let's call it narrative then.

By this stage, it’s fair to say that I think the viewer needs to bring his or her own interpretation of events and personal baggage with them and not feel like it’s an illegitimate way to approach the film... otherwise, I’d have to say, I can see a huge chunk of the audience getting extremely cross with the movie... at least as many as I suspect will look on it as a work of genius. For myself, in terms of the story, I guess I’m half and half with it but, as a deliberately slow paced spectacle with a wonderful central performance by the always reliable Swinton, I think I’d definitely have to err on the side of future classic, although I suspect it might not quite get that place in cinematic history books.

So, yeah, all in all I’m glad I saw Memoria and I’m also glad that, here in the UK, it didn’t have the gnarly release pattern it has in the US... where it will play in only one cinema for one week announced just a few days before it plays, before moving onto another cinema for one week... with no future home video release in its future. So, in that way, I guess I have to thank Sovereign Film Distribution for making it... just a little easier to ever see over here. My final word on it is... well... apart from the fact that I only have a little of a handle on what the film was actually about (there are, I think, a few possibilities and as I said, I think it’s down to individual interpretation)... I think it’s no spoiler to say that the final narrative punch of the film (or maybe just a slow poke in the cheek rather than punch, it might be said), is not all that different from the first time I experienced the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. It’s not the same ending or at least as direct (and again, it’s open to interpretation and also has a definitive, single, science fiction shot in it) but it’s certainly not easy to forget either and it’s one of those films, I think, that will both divide audiences but also haunt them all for a while after being seen. So, personally, I think you should take that as a recommendation of a good movie worth trying to see but... you know... that’s all open to interpretation.