In a few films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has forged a singular artistic identity, and therefore immediately recognizable. Winner of the Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee, the one who remembers his past lives, the Thai filmmaker uses cinematic language for experimental and poetic ends that are deliberately disconcerting, but always fascinating. Co-winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Memoria sees the author further explore favorite themes such as memory, metaphysics, mysterious illnesses, nature as a place of communion…
Enigmatic, the result is unlike anything usual or known, and that’s how we love Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema. We rediscover with pleasure this taste for the fixed shot in which nothing seems to happen, but where a lot nevertheless happens; this predilection for skillfully modulated slowness… This is, for the account, his first film outside Thailand, in English moreover, although Spanish is also present there.
Camped in Colombia, Memoria stars the equally singular Tilda Swinton, who plays Jessica, a British horticulturist who has come to Bogotá to watch over her hospitalized sister. From the opening sequence, Jessica is startled awake by a sudden and powerful explosion. Untimely, this tinnitus periodically comes back to haunt her without her being able to determine its origin. A young sound engineer (named Hernan) will help her before by chance during a stay in the mountains, where a new friend is carrying out excavations, she crosses paths with a man (named Hernan, well) who not only remembers everything, but is also able to recall the memories of others when in contact with objects.
This unusual encounter, which gradually becomes very touching and whose tenor never ceases to amaze, alone constitutes the third act of the film, one of the filmmaker’s most narrative (if one might say so). This, even if the latter takes up elements of Cemetery of Splendorperhaps its most abstract.
life like a stream
Moreover, during the first act, one fears for a moment that this relative linearity deprives Memoria bursts of magical realism and whimsical flashes characteristic of the cinema of the director of Tropical Disease. Only here, like the heroine, we understand a posteriori that the strangeness was there from the start.
Throughout, various allusions are made to august beliefs and myths, to scientific data… Without it being explained, which the filmmaker never does and we are grateful to him for it, all this forms a kind of puzzle cognition related to Jessica’s hearing impairment. Trouble whose source – unexpected – will prove to be in phase with the fundamentally atypical nature of the filmmaker.
By playing with contrasting transitions, the filmmaker also keeps the audience on the alert, despite the ambient languor. After the nocturnal silence of an apartment comes the deafening symphony of car alarms in a parking lot at daybreak, or again, the entry of the protagonist into what has just been designated as a morgue follows the interior of a vast library, among other examples coming almost from the psychoanalytical free association. The film distils an unprecedented existential angst in the author, who refuses this being to give in to gloom.
About the morgue, which turns out to be more of an archaeological laboratory where the remains of thousands of years are examined, death and fungal decay are as usual present in the seemingly disjointed, but ultimately concerted reflections of Weerasethakul. Life seems to be a stream for the filmmaker, death and the subsequent decomposition of the body being only simple stages. From these survives something intangible: a spirit or, yes, a memory.