MEMORIA MOVIE MOVIE

Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish botanist who is visiting her sister in Bogotá. He returns now with his first English-language film, which premiered and won the Jury Prize earlier this year at Cannes.

MEMORIA MOVIE MOVIE

Almost every movie he has made has been screened here, and in 2013 he won The Silver Mirror Honorary Award during his visit to the festival.

It requires a different sense of comprehension – one that when unlocked will leave you craving more.Apichatpong Weerasethakul is no stranger to the Films From the South festival crowd.

Memoria will move anyone who gets on its level, but it’s not moving in a melodramatic or even dramatic emotional sense. But, if you can unlearn what you think a film should be and re-learn with Weerasethakul what previously unknown ways a film can shape you, Memoria will win you over.īut it’s up to you, and, frankly speaking, it’s a challenge – the kind of challenge that can fine-tune a hundred little knobs in your brain, unbeknownst to you, and spit you out a new person, even if takes you a while to realize it. He’s making new, unrecognizable art, creating fresh, still experiences that might confuse us or make us restless at first.

He’s one of few directors we must learn to acclimate to, not the other way around. They cut deep into you undetected, like a praying mantis, and it’s only a matter of time before you realize how strong the impact has been. In the immediate aftermath, they might make you well up inexplicably at random times in the day or fall into a fit of unfounded laughter. His films hover in your soul and stay there. But no one can figure out how he made it. He’s the guy who brings a threatening dish to the potluck that ends up being everyone’s favorite. He creates a sense of internal mystery and a longing for something unseen yet achievable, perhaps a truer self. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.Ībove all, this might be what Weerasethakul is best known for, what he brings to cinema that no one else does. My initial reaction was subdued, but within a few hours of finishing, it was reverberating in and around me, like the boom. I’ve loved several films at Cannes this year, but even the ones I’ve cherished most haven’t lodged themselves into my core like Memoria. But for all the seeming nothingness that makes up Memoria, if I were to tell you what happens, you’d think I was joking. We don’t see most of the character work onscreen. She seems invariable, but the profound transformation is taking place in the character beneath the surface of the images, and Weerasethakul is measured in how he chooses to communicate that. Countless shots of Jessica just linger on her in thought, sitting on a bed or breathing in a chair. The lion’s share of Memoria’s 136-minutes is comprised of wide, static, pacifying shots (thanks to brilliant cinematographer and long-time collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) that prompt you to either take a nap or enter a contemplative inner arena. However, there’s not much to spoil as far as the plot is concerned, and there’s not much more to the story than what I’ve told you. But soon, the hunt turns toward less conventional specialists, like a sound engineer who she hopes can recreate the noise she’s hearing for reference and a fish scaler for reasons too spoilery to explain. She starts with herself, visiting a doctor to see if it’s coming from within or if she could get some sleeping pills to keep her down amid the commotion. The sound has no discernible pattern or source, but it’s keeping her awake and confounded, so she decides to investigate. Then the boom startles us once again like it startles Jessica. The sound of the booms hang in the air, reverberating across the jungle and eventually fading from the soundscape, giving way to long, silent pauses that we’re meant to sit in. One morning at dusk, she hears a loud, earthy boom.

Jessica Holland (Swinton) is a patient, soft-spoken Scottish botanist working in Bogotá. Lastly, it marks his first collaboration with Tilda Swinton, which is not misleading. As far as we’re concerned, the jungle of Colombia could be the jungle of Thailand we’ve come to know so well through his films. Likewise, it marks his first film shot outside of his native Thailand, which is also misleading. Memoria marks the Palme d’Or-winning director’s English- and Spanish-language debut, but that’s a bit misleading. His newest, Memoria, fits that description to a tee. The Thai writer, producer, director, and Cannes darling has made a name for himself as a philosophical filmmaker with a singular penchant for wedding the cinematic and the spiritual in visually dense, gorgeous, quiet, and simply-plotted stories that often pack a surprise mystical punch. One might listen to contemplative music, sit in self-reflective silence, commune with nature, get a massage, consider poetry, or watch an Apichatpong Weerasethakul ( Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Tropical Malady) film.