Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2021)

In a Bogotá hotel room, Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is woken from sleep one night by a bang and gets up from her bed.  It takes an age for her to do so.  Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is slow cinema all right, and this kind of contrived retardation is more exasperating than the other aspect of the film’s slowness:  numerous, long-held shots of rooms or landscapes undisturbed by people or movement – except, in some outdoor sequences, the effects of a breeze.  These shots can be compelling, even mysterious.  The longer they go on, the more they begin to suggest – somehow – a point of view beyond that of the camera.

An expatriate Scot and a widow, Jessica lives in Colombia’s second-biggest city, Medellín, where she grows and sells orchids.  She’s in the capital visiting her sister (Agnes Brekke), who, in an early scene, is receiving hospital treatment for an unspecified respiratory complaint.  Jessica starts to hear repeatedly the sudden noise that broke her sleep and, once it’s clear the sound is originating inside her head rather than in the world outside it, tries to find out more.   Her brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho) puts her in touch with Hernán Bedoya (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound expert based in a university.  Hernán asks Jessica to describe what she hears so that he can use technical means to reproduce it.  He also offers to drive her to an orchid market, and lightly flirts with her.  When she returns to Hernán’s sound lab for the next stage in their collaboration, he’s nowhere to be seen.  She makes enquiries of other staff, who have never heard of Hernán.  This is the first of several dislocations experienced by Jessica.  Although these aren’t definitely signalled by the boom in her head, that noise does come to seem like a symptom of the faltering reality of her world.

Jessica becomes insomniac and depressed.  When she seeks help from a psychologist (Constanza Gutiérrez), she receives surprising therapeutic advice:  turn to Jesus Christ.  Instead, she drives from Bogotá into rural parts.  During a stop en route, she meets an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) who shows Jessica the recently excavated skull of a young woman, who lived six thousand years ago and underwent trepanation.  Jessica’s last and seemingly most crucial encounter is with another Hernán Bedoya, an older man (Elkin Díaz) who claims to be unable to forget anything that has happened to him.  (This includes the end of a previous existence; Jessica asks what dying was like and Hernán senior replies, ‘It was OK.  I just stopped’.)  His gift or curse of infallible memory is realised in the physical objects he owns, which emit ‘recordings’ of his experiences.  In conversation with the younger Hernán, Jessica spoke Spanish haltingly; talking with his older namesake, she’s fluent in the language.  The film ends with her starting herself to ‘feel’ Hernán’s memories – and, it seems, to feel healed by doing so.

If you read even a little about Memoria, chances are you’ll see it described as surreal, dreamlike, moving from rational to irrational perspectives, a spiritual odyssey, and so on.  Recounting the detail of your dreams to someone else is a byword for boring them:  dreamers tend to give merely a blow-by-blow description of what happened.  A gifted film-maker can do better, using technique and imagination to enable the audience to partake of an on-screen dreamer’s psychic experience – of what ‘seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much’, as Sylvia Plath puts it in ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’.  As I recall, Apichatpong did achieve something of this in the oneiric disjunctures and imagery of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), the only piece of his work I’d seen previously.  A main problem I had with Memoria was in finding it too sluggish and insufficiently arbitrary to be dreamlike.  By moving along like a patient psychological thriller, it encourages, before dashing, hopes for a ‘solution’ – even if such hopes reflect what the viewer has come to look for in a particular genre.  Watching Memoria certainly makes you aware of what you naturally expect (or are conditioned to expect) from a film, and that the man who made this one isn’t interested in satisfying such expectations.  You may wonder, even so, if the bangs in Jessica’s head aren’t strategically placed to ensure – a bit like the fortissimo chord in Haydn’s Surprise’ Symphony – that drowsy members of the audience don’t drop off completely, and thereby experience narrative discontinuity beyond what Apichatpong intends.

He creates some exceptional images.  Close to the end of the film, there’s a prolonged shot dominated by an object that could be either an extra-terrestrial spacecraft or a whale – which leaves you unsure if it’s situated in the Colombian jungle or if the film has suddenly moved to the ocean floor.  (The object finally takes off to underline its UFO credentials.)  There’s even the occasional moment of eccentric humour.  After the opening bang and Jessica’s slow-motion rise to investigate, the camera journeys out of her hotel room into a small car park nearby.  One car alarm goes off, others join in; the symphony-cacophony rises to a crescendo until, one by one, the alarms stop and silence eventually reigns once more in the darkness.  The sequence suggests a sonic counterpart to the one in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) where car lights wink at each other.  Apichatpong and his lead actress, whose versatility is endless and seems effortless, agreed it was important to set Memoria in a country where neither would feel at home.  It’s often absorbing to witness the expression, from behind the camera, of being in a strange place.  Apichatpong manages to do this not only in observing Colombia’s distinctive landscape but also in presenting impersonal office settings in Bogotá that might be thought pretty standard the world over.

Jessica’s odd auditory experiences were inspired by the writer-director’s own:  he has suffered from the little understood condition that is sometimes termed ‘exploding head syndrome’.  Although ‘suffered’ is hardly the word:  according to Tony Rayns’s Sight & Sound (Winter 2021-22) review, Apichatpong ‘came to regard the “bang” as a “strange pleasure” and even regretted the loss when it stopped happening’.  It’s been interesting to read about this film after seeing it – Rayns in S&S and, despite its digressions, Hilton Als’s New Yorker profile of Apitchatpong.  Memoria makes for a testing two hours-plus in the cinema, though.  I was relieved when it was over.

18 January 2022