Memoria

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

MEMORIA   ****

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2021

IDEA:  A British woman in Bogotá, Colombia tries to find the source of a strange booming sound only she seems to hear.

BLURB:  Sound is such a naturalized part of daily life that we don’t often think about how unique a material phenomenon it is. It can seep across boundaries and pass through physical objects; index distance, location, mass, and time; form into melodies encoded with meanings and affects; reverberate within the body as a haptic experience. Apichatpong has always foregrounded the auditory in his films, but in Memoria it becomes his driving force and organizing principle, the phenomenological vehicle by which he unlocks other perceptual states. The sound Tilda Swinton’s Jessica keeps hearing may be purely subjective, but technology and the cinema, as Apichatpong self-reflexively demonstrates, are able to reproduce and transmit it for others to share. Simply and ingeniously, Memoria equates this communicable power with memory, specifically national memory, which it understands as embedded in the landscape and transferred through material things. In a familiar dichotomy, Apichatpong’s narrative transitions from a modern urban environment to a lush rural one, where the shedding of the city’s sensory stimuli allows for an opening of consciousness to history, myth, and dream. Here, Memoria offers its most distended shots, its most transcendent marriages of image and sound, revealing the world in all its porousness as a sponge of intercorporeal sensations and resonances. While Apichatpong doesn’t quite address the connotations of having Jessica, a white European woman, serve as his conduit for Colombia’s colonial trauma, race seems to be fairly beside the point for the director. Like sounds and their affects, so much of Memoria bypasses language and dissolves barriers, sublimely attuning us to the unaccountable phenomenological networks that flow all around and within us, beneath the visible surface of things. For Apichatpong, accessing these networks is but a matter of gentle perceptual modulation, whether through sound, music, food, drugs, conversation, meditation - or film.