Tilda Swinton searches for art and transcendence amid chaos.
Following the hard sell of frantic hyperbolic releases such as The Batman, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the quiet stillness of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is almost welcome. More surprising, the Thai director’s latest exercise in art-house mysticism feels relevant to this period of irrational fears and politicized panic.
It is the slow-paced style of presenting Scottish widow Jessica (played by Tilda Swinton) in Bogotá, Colombia, falling down her own emotional rabbit hole, that makes Memoria more accessible than Weerasethakul’s previous films. We may finally settle for his experimental, refined solipsism as a rejection of the constant, noisy inundation of fake news and gaslighting edicts.
Leisure-class Jessica evades modern chaos but is obsessed by a single sound that awakens her just before dawn. Her search to find the source of that resonant thud plays like an adult’s cautious version of the phony procedural violence that constitutes the grim clinical forensics in The Batman. In Memoria, Jessica is always reminded of her human sensitivity rather than cheap dread about mankind’s monstrousness.
While Hollywood’s infantilizing distractions can be corrosive for minds keen on excitation, Memoria’s peaceableness invites contemplation alongside Jessica’s need for relief. When she timidly asks for Xanax, the female physician refuses: “You look like you could be addicted. You could lose empathy with the beauty of life or the sadness of life.” She advises Jesus, instead.
Weerasethakul’s previous films (Topical Malady, Uncle Boonmee, Syndromes and a Century) typically avoided Western nostrums — which appealed to the tastes of Western cynics who ironically praised the U.S.-trained filmmaker as if he were some Asian shaman. But his fondness for dense, Rousseauian tableaux indicates a different mindset. Memoria is the first Weerasethakul film in which the settings (traversing Colombian towns and jungles) evince Western influence. Jessica’s obsession with that confounding sound (a distant, beckoning boom) leads her to new encounters and audiovisual experiences: with a female archaeologist (Jeanne Balibar), a recording engineer (Juan Pablo Urrego), and a philosophizing middle-aged hermit named Hernan (Elkin Díaz) whose parables inspire Jessica to deeper reflection. (“Why are you crying, they are not your memories?”)
In Memoria, the need to recall a distant echo defines the millennium’s new alienation better than heeding the phony hyper-engagement of media sophisticates and Hollywood nihilists does. Through Jessica, Weerasethakul pursues anxiety and neurosis in order to exorcize them. He’s retreading Antonioni, going back to nature (through state-of-the-art digital sound), back to beautiful cinema (35 mm imagery by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom). Jessica’s desire for an evocative, meaningful signal (a message) shows a clear need to communicate.
Swinton, the hipster dowager of high fashion and high art (and sometimes bad art gussied up in pretentiousness) always confirms how good an actress she can be and is striking as Weerasethakul’s quintessential lost Westerner. Swinton’s face — sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought — anticipates revelation from out of the earth, out of space, or the past.
Not even the best parts of Memoria are original. The quartet of automobile alarms sparking a flurry of mechanical headlights wittily combines Spielberg’s Close Encounters light show with Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. Even the climax suggests a big-screen video game rather than Antonioni’s world-changing vision of sex and faith. Still, Weerasethakul’s majestic spectacle moves us an artistic distance away from junk culture.
