In one scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” Jessica (Tilda Swinton) and a friend browse refrigerated cabinets designed to preserve flowers. “In here, time stops,” the saleswoman says proudly, gesturing at the blue cupboards. The same could be said of the film at large. A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot—as well as to their own posture and breathing.
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The awareness is both physiological and ecological, and that’s the point. “Memoria” is a film largely about the slow, glacial time and the inconsequentiality of humans within it, yet it manages to do so without being dismissive of individual experience. Jessica, Swinton’s character, is a British botanist living in Colombia who wakes up one morning to the sound of a huge, metallic boom, like “a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater,” as she describes it to Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound engineer who tries to help her recreate the sound in a recording studio. Even more puzzlingly, she seems to be the only one who can hear it; her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) and her husband are both nonplussed at the dinner table while Jessica freezes in search of the sound’s source. Doctors are unable to diagnose her, though she manages to secure Xanax from a skeptical physician. It’s only when she encounters an unfamiliar man scaling fish in the midst of the Colombian forest that she begins to understand that her ailment is not her own; the sound is not an individual, medical problem but a broad, environmental one.
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From there, “Memoria” gets stranger, even incorporating an odd magical realist twist that feels somewhat out of place for a film that lingers in the indefinable, vaporous energies of its setting and conceit. “Memoria” is unlike any other, a vague, unsettling dream of a film that feels at first impenetrable and then oddly moving. Its long, unchanging scenes can be punishing tests of attrition, and the faint of heart, particularly those unfamiliar with an arthouse sensibility, will struggle to fully buy into the film’s style. But for the viewers who stay, Weerasethakul delivers an experience that is meditative and existentially transcendent, a long, hard look at the scope of human life and its place on a global timeline.
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“Memoria” channels its energy into the broad, luscious scope of its setting, which feels at times concretely urban and others pastoral and almost supernatural. The film embraces the nebulousness of its premise, as spiritual maladies and bad omens ail characters. At one point, Jessica’s sister Karen is hospitalized after an unidentifiable illness, which she ties first to the death of a stray dog she witnessed earlier, then to an uncontactable tribe in the middle of the Amazon whom she believes is repelling her with a spell. The body becomes a vessel for incorporeal forces whose source is never definitively revealed (another way in which the film resists conventionality), and a vague unsettlement percolates as the sound in Jessica’s head recurs without warning like a jump scare. “I think I’m going crazy,” she confesses.
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There are never any resolute conclusions, though “Memoria” seems to offer some indication in the form of warring images of industrial progress and ecological preservation. Large trucks drill tunnels through the earth while archaeologists puzzle over 6,000-year-old skeletal remains. Weerasethakul depicts Colombia as a place in the midst of modernizing while also uncovering its anthropological past. The result is a contradictory mélange of attitudes, a race toward and against modernity. It’s this paradox that unsettles the history of the place and time, the ecological and economic embodiment of Benjamin’s Angel of History. However, the past may beckon, progress pulls us irrevocably toward the future.
There’s also a distinct gaze that colors the film, which the film seems conscious of but never comments directly on, and the result is a thoughtful contemplation of tourism, expatriation, and estrangement. Set in Colombia, “Memoria” marks Weerasethakul’s first film outside of Thailand and his first with a movie star of Swinton’s stature. Swinton’s casting, in particular, feels very deliberate; a white woman in Colombia, Jessica is already out of place when she begins to experience her symptoms, and the unfamiliarity seems to heighten the estrangement while suggesting a metacommentary on colonial legacy. Jessica’s physiological condition is not really about herself, after all, but rather an experience of hyper-empathy. “Why are you crying?” Hernan asks her at the end of the film. “They’re not your memories.” Perhaps they’re not ours, either, but they move us all the same. [A-]
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Neon will release “Memoria” later this year.