Memoria

*Watched at Cannes 2021 World Premiere*

The work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (try saying that five times fast) have never fully been able to register with audiences outside of the festival circuit. He has amassed universal critical acclaim since he graced the Cannes Riviera in 2004 with "Tropical Malady." He creates gaps between his feature films by creating several short films, some of which eventually are spawned into feature-length, such as the 2009 short "A Letter to Uncle Boonmee" becoming the 2010 Palme d'Or winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives." Now in 2021, Weerasethakul is stepping outside of his native Thailand for "Memoria," (translated from the Latin word "memory") which prompted another return to Cannes, this time netting him the Jury Prize.

The first English-language film for Weerasethakul, "Memoria'' is set within Colombia, following Tilda Swinton from destination to destination. The film opens with a surprising jumpscare illustrating our main character's problem, which is that she often hears a loud crashing noise that seems to be confined entirely within her head. This noise confounds her, leading to an investigation into what exactly it is and why it is happening, which puts her in contact with a sound engineering student, a morgue doctor, and a strange fisherman offering profound insights on memory and identity.

Those familiar with the work of Weerasethakul will know that the plot is not the driving force behind the ultimate narrative. Instead, the visuals and sound work do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Within "Memoria," dialogue is seldom found for long stretches at a time, leaving the viewer to look at the screen like one would look at a painting, soaking in as much information as possible. This restriction of information will irritate those looking for answers to the questions the film raises, which Weerasethakul doesn't have any intention of addressing. The Cannes World Premiere garnered nearly fifty walkouts from disgruntled viewers, and several nodding heads from the slow pacing that were often reawakened by the mysterious crashing noise, which shook the theatre.

Swinton acts less like a character and more like a wandering observer. Never shot in closeup and always present of the world around her, she moves from place to place, learning new information about her condition, all without much dialogue from her end. The first half of the film is where Swinton does most of her traveling, which keeps the film moving at a steady, yet still slow, pace. Much of the "action" within these journeys would be considered filler in most mainstream projects, such as Swinton waiting patiently for the sound engineer to finish his work before addressing her, or an unbroken take consisting solely of car alarms going off.

The last hour of the film is where some will applaud and others will boo (just as they did at the world premiere). Swinton's final journey takes her to a remote village housing a fisherman who claims to remember everything about his life. The two of them engage in an extended conversation that explores the strange connection they share. To an extent, the conversation acts as a vessel for Weerasethakul to talk to his audience about his ideas about cinema and life. It's a bold move by a director not known for boldness, and is one that teeters reshapes the way you look at the world at its best and teeters on self-aggrandizing at its worst. Weerasethakul ties his thesis up in a perfect bow with an ultimate answer that is fittingly incomprehensible and produces several more questions.

"Memoria" is a work for the cinephiles that need an escape from the noise of the modern world. It's wildly beautiful and imaginative, all while challenging your patience and viewpoints. Go in with an open mind, and you find yourself enlightened.

This is going to be very difficult for some to watch. Tilda is fantastic, the way she connected with the story telling for the concept of memories, is what helps this movie. Good visuals, eerie atmosphere, sometimes you get lost a bit, but then you find what is all going. This movie is released for those who need to actually watch these types of cinema, not for the average movie fan.

I like slow-burning films; the idea of being given enough time to really live in the movie you are watching really appeals to me, often more so than faster-paced, spectacular projects. I also like arthouse films; the atmosphere and characters can often be just as engaging, if not more, than a traditionally linear storyline. Thing is, you need to have at least the semblance of a storyline in a film, otherwise, it's like buying a loaf of bread and finding no bread in it!

Memoria is deliberately pitched at a snail's pace. There isn't a storyline as such, but rather a series of events, some of which we return to. Clearly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who writes and directs, has a vision for this - together, one would presume, with his cast and crew. For the most part, it leaves me cold, and I find myself trying to imagine how Weerasethakul initially tried to communicate what he is trying to achieve here to his actors. I actually felt the makers were taking the mickey, daring me to stick with this when they have no intention of providing much reason to, or indeed any kind of pay-off.

Some will undoubtedly tell me I don't 'get' it, and that's almost certainly true, but I can't honestly see that there is anything *to* get, because with the suspension of disbelief fully installed, all I see here is a group of blandly inoffensive people doing very little except having whispered conversations and being desperately polite to each other in front of an unmoving camera. There were times when I had to wait for someone to blink to convince myself the BluRay hadn't frozen. This left me cold, I'm afraid. My score is 3 out of 10 for some nicely filmed locations.

This movie is very hard to watch and requires much patience. If you can connect with the movie, it will make it easier to watch. There are very long and still sequences. From the beginning to the end of the film, confusion prevails. We cant really understand what is happening. Nothing is clear. And the movie does not give us many answers. This is a "feel" movie. If you cant connect with the characters or the storyline it will be a disappointing experience for you.

To me this is the main issue with Memoria. For example, the IMDB question about spoilers is not even needed, there can be basically no spoilers when reviewing this film, since the "narrative" (can't really call it that) is fragmented and merely the pretext for the reflections the movie undertakes on several clever memory-related topics (notably the reality of recollection), from the simple perspective of the experiences concerning a single human individual, to the collective thoughts of a society as a whole. In that vein the characters and some movie conventions (the classical journey of the main character, although we are never sure what it exactly is) are used as a sort of vessels.

As long as that is accepted I found that most of my criticism (which would put me firmly on the side of "bad" reviewers) fell off the wayside, and I enjoyed this beautifully shot contemplative piece for what it was.

But why didn't I rate it higher? Frankly because I was underwhelmed with the meditation itself or the tropes enveloping it (as I saw them), finding some of them trite and even ridiculous. Meditation around different issues comes also from some sort of familiarity, and I was not convinced that the filmmaker was not merely a tourist in this universe, rather than someone with a particularly deep insight.

This sort of approach is, of course, totally acceptable, just not something I could relate to here, as I could in other films he has done. And thus issues such the length of the film (as well as some of the sequences) became a problem, which would not have been the case had I felt fully in sync with the piece.