Memoria

I swim, to where I don’t even know, through a veil of rain to a sound that may be a memory of the past, a heartache and an echo of something ethereal. Perhaps all of it was a reality from which someone remembers everything. Or a dream from the sleep of someone who dreams of nothing. Maybe both. Whereas some films offer an enhanced experience under the influence of substances, others depend on a dozing viewer. With his films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul lulls viewers, always whispering a few sentences that after a while sometimes agitate our minds, sometimes merely amuse us with their gentle humour, and at other times force us to abandon useless concepts of reality, logic and linear continuity. Whoever accedes to this will not experience an awakening, but will rather spend two hours floating in a state where the touch of the universe has the same weight as the gurgling of rain. I wasn’t enchanted so much by Memoria as by the director’s more hypnotic and mysterious delving into the space-time of feelings, but it was still pleasant to let myself be carried away by the film. How paradoxical it is that such a film should open a festival whose viewers frantically stress out over the combinatorics of schedules and programming priorities. It is far better that it brings to an end the echoes of that festival. (Šary Vary 2021) (03.09.2021)

The meditative and spiritual Memoria has been described as Apichatpong’s most accessible film, but because of the extremely slow pace of the narrative, the length of some of the static and narratively empty contemplative shots and the ambiguous symbolism, it will be appreciated by, at most, one percent of potential viewers (I am not a member of that one percent). For the first time, the Thai filmmaker ventured beyond the borders of his own country and dispensed with Asian mythology and culture, but he retained his unmistakable poetic trademarks and techniques. Set in Spanish/English-speaking Colombia, Memoria is the story of a widowed woman (portrayed by Tilda Swinton in an intentionally subdued performance) who tries to uncover the origins of the clamorous wounds that occasionally ring in her head. Together with the spiritual quest to make sense of and analyze the randomly echoing noise, Apichatpong also focuses on contrasting metaphorical motifs, referring either to the decay and extinction of life (the thousand-year-old remains, the unknown illness of the protagonist’s sister) or, conversely, to its long-term preservation (the refrigerator for orchids). Overall, however, it is difficult to stay awake during this film, and neither the healing and cleansing immersion in the arms of nature in the second half nor the strange final sci-fi/fantasy point can do anything to change that. (28.08.2021)