Picture of the movie Memoria © Kick the Machine Films, Burning, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, ZDF-Arte and Piano, 2021
Memoria, the New Sensory Journey from Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Eleven years after winning the Palme d’or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat), the Thai director returns In Competition with Memoria, a sensitive feature film about memory and solitude in which, for the first time, he has left his native land, where he had set all of his previous films.
When we last left the dreamlike cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it was under the ghostly multicoloured lights of a military hospital, at the bedside of soldiers compelled to undergo a strange therapy after an unknown illness had plunged them into a deep sleep. A profoundly political work behind its façade of supernatural suggestions and parallel lives, Cemetery Of Splendour (Rak Ti Khon Kaen)– screened as part of Un Certain Regard in 2015 – was a subtle denunciation of the authoritarian reforms of the military junta that took power in Thailand in 2014 with a coup d’état.
This shamanic fable on sleeping and dreaming, both contemplative and meditative, also recalls Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s fascination for cognitive science and the way the brain functions, which is one of the major motifs of Memoria. It tells the story of Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a botanist specializing in orchids, who, when visiting Bogota, where her ill sister lives, is surprised by a loud explosion. When night falls, she is haunted by strange sounds that prevent her from sleeping. Jessica then decides to try to determine the origin if this mysterious sound that torments her soul.
Shot in the mountains of Pijao and in the Colombian capital of Bogota, Memoria invites the spectator on a highly visual journey of the senses in harmony with the strange intimacy that Apichatpong Weerasethakul develops with his long shots.
The Thai director, who considers cinema an instinctive art and compares its power to a form of (black) magic capable of bewitching our spirits, has taken an interest in the physical manifestation of sound and on its impact on our memory. As spiritual and organic as they may be, his stories that seem like a waking dream, where illusions play and the ghosts of ancestral myths wander, never cease – as Memoria proves – to anchor themselves in reality.
