`Memoria' plays on mystery, magic of life
The films of Thai writer-director Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, “Memoria” included, are marked by long takes and long silences that may or may not reveal the magic hidden beneath the surface of things.
In his 2010 entry “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” a dying man is cared for by the ghost of his dead wife and visited by a forest spirit that used to be his son.
In “Memoria,” a film co-produced by lead actor Tilda Swinton, a Scottish horticulturalist doing research in Medellin, Colombia, hears a sound that wakes her up and spends the rest of the film trying to track it down and find out what it is.
At first Jessica goes to a sound engineer on the campus of the Colombian university where she works. His name is Hernan Bedoya (Juan Pablo Urrego) and based on her descriptions he replicates the noise she heard in her bed and hears intermittently afterwards, using sophisticated sonic machinery.
Weerasethakul shoots scenes from a distance. He does not cut a lot. Sometimes, you may have trouble making out what people are saying because you can't see their lips. “Memoria” can be trying and is often mystifying, if not also mystical. What is Jessica looking for? Why are she, and we, hearing the sound? Does it have anything to do with the archaeological finds being made because of work being done on a tunnel? Is it somehow connected to her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who is in a hospital bed when we first meet her.
Earlier, a university colleague of Jessica's begins to compose a poem about bacteria. We hear car alarms, a bus backfire in the street and a snippet of a lecture and are told by the lecturer that wood is “hygroscopic.” Bong.
For Weerasethakul, life is one enormous mystery and we are all our own satellite dishes, seeking signals. A woman supervising a morgue asks Jessica if she'd like to have a look around. Of course, she does. A stray dog appears to follow Jessica in the street at night. A hole drilled in a skull thousands of years old may have been made “to release bad spirits.” Bong. Young Hernan tells Jessica that the band he is in is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble. Bong
Is writer-director Weerasethakul toying with us? Of course, he is. Is there really a tribe in the rain forest that can cast a spell making itself invisible to strangers? Why does young Hernan disappear? Is the sound Jessica hears a harbinger of death? Or would that be too Edgar Allan Poeish?
“Donnie Darko” Weerasekathul trades in dream-like mystery and cryptic imagery. Cohort Swinton suddenly turns on the waterworks, weeping uncontrollably, as many of us have done during this plague. She encounters a man living alone scraping the scales off fish in a garden. Weerasethakul shows us images that might explain everything. But are they real? Remember: The film is called “Memory.”