National Post (National Edition)
BIG BANG THEORIES
ETHEREAL SWINTON MESMERIZES IN QUIETLY CAPTIVATING MEMORIA
Memoria
Cast: Tilda Swinton
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Duration: 2 h 16 m Memoria is playing in Toronto, and opens May 27 in Vancouver, and June 3 in Calgary and Ottawa, with other locations to follow. See memoria.film/locations/ for more times and locations.
If you're the type who would pay money to watch the ethereal Tilda Swinton just mosey around Colombia for two hours, Memoria might just be the movie for you. Not a whole lot happens to her character, Jessica Holland, during the two-plus hours of the film. And yet it's oddly captivating, the kind of story that has you leaning forward in your seat, trying to make sense of just what quiet, semi-magical things are going on.
Jessica is a stranger in Bogota, where she's come to visit her sister in hospital. But not that much of a stranger — she lives in Medellin, a few hundred kilometres to the north, and has been there long enough to speak passable Spanish.
In the opening scene, she is woken early one morning by a loud noise, midway between a thump and a crash. Is it in her head? She can't find any evidence of something having made it, but we also notice that a bunch of car alarms go off in a sort of cascading cacophony so maybe they heard it to. Or maybe they're just paranoid.
Jessica visits a sound engineer named Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego), who tries to recreate the noise on a mixing board, starting with movie sound effects like someone getting punched, and working with her descriptions — less echo, earthier, rounder, more sea water, less bass — to create a kind of aural police sketch. But it doesn't tell her what made the noise, or even if it's real; merely that it can be duplicated. And so she goes back to her life, while the sound occasionally catches up with her in unexpected places. (You may never come across the term “art house jumpscare” before or after this review, but there it is.)
The best word I could come up with to describe the meandering plot of Memoria is multidisciplinary. Jessica is often in a university setting, where she reads up on viruses, attends a musical performance and examines some 6,000-year-old skulls. During a chat with her sister, she recites a poem she's recently composed, then does an impromptu magic trick. She flirts a little with Hernan, who then ghosts her — literally. No one remembers who he is.
For her own part, Swinton delivers a superbly naturalistic performance, bare and unshowy. She visits a doctor about her noise problem, angling for Xanax but receiving instead a prescription for a new pillow and, for good measure, Jesus Christ. Late in the movie she meets another guy named Hernan, who sounds like he might have an explanation for what ails her. But don't expect any easy or obvious answers.
Pacing and sound are of course of prime importance for a film like this, which may be why its writer/ director, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has decided to release the film in a road show format, with limited screenings that move from city to city over the summer. He has also said that Memoria will never makes its way to streaming or DVD. If so, that's one more reason to explore this mesmerizing movie while you can.