Memoria (2021)

For the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, reality must be portrayed in all its richness, splendor and complexity. Reality must include our dreams, memories, and projections of the future. The universe of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a mixture of Tarkovsky’s reasoning elements with some aspects of Thai culture: the belief in reincarnation, the intimate relationship with nature and the intense connection with lives from other worlds. To understand and enjoy Apichatpong’s cinema, it’s essential to take these notions into account.

Throughout his filmography, Apichatpong has consolidated a brilliant fusion of spiritual and meditative cinema via the encounters of his protagonists with themselves and with all aspects of reality that surround them at every moment. Through films like Tropical Malady (2004), Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), the Thai filmmaker has built an unusual and refreshing style in the universe of arthouse cinema. For the film Memoria (2021), Apichatpong decided to leave behind his country and space, as well as the Thai language. The film is set in Colombia, the protagonist is a British actress (Tilda Swinton), and the language flows through English and Spanish. Even so, the film preserves many of the most essential characteristics of Apichatpong’s style since his unique voice immediately found points of identification with the wonderful South American landscape.

Memoria (2021) begins by exposing us to a strange sound that invades the mind and disturbs the sleep of Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an English woman dedicated to the floral industry. Jessica resides in Medellín, but she briefly visits Bogotá to see her sister, Karen (Agnes Brekke). Jessica’s sister is hospitalized due to a rare respiratory disease. Jessica believes that the strange sound comes from a neighboring construction site, but Karen’s husband, Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho) makes clear that there is no such place next to her house. Soon, Jessica realizes that she is the only person who can listen to the sound. When it happens, a lot of surrounding car alarms are inexplicably activated, putting together an irritating and noisy chorus. With the intention of finding the sound that torments her, Jessica visits a young sound engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego). Inside National University of Colombia’s recording studio, Hernán tries to digitally replicate the descriptions that Jessica makes of it in meticulous detail: “a large ball of concrete slamming into a metal wall surrounded by seawater”. At the same university, Jessica also meets Jeanne (Agnes Cerkinsky), a French anthropologist who works in the excavations of a tunnel in the Colombian mountains, where multiple human fossils have been found.

With both Hernán and Jeanne, Jessica establishes relationships that link her to a world that seems to be alienated from her own reality. One day, Hernán goes missing. Jessica immediately approaches to a group of young people from the university, in order to see if they have news of him. The group affirms that there is no Hernán with the characteristics that Jessica describes, and that a person like that has never worked in that place. Jessica decides to visit Jeanne, who has traveled to supervise the excavations. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” she confesses to her; Jeanne replies that she does too, but that “there are worse things” than that. In the midst of her visit to Jeanne, Jessica decides to venture inside the beautiful Colombian jungle. Once there, she finds a small town and meets a singular man named Hernán (Elkin Díaz). This mystic character seems to represent an older version of the young sound engineer. Hernán says that he remembers every little aspect of his and other people’s lives, and that’s why he has never left the town. A firm connection is immediately established between Jessica and Hernán, both complement each other in their own understanding of the world.

Eventually, reality starts to blur, the natural order of things comes down and the narrative enters into a dreamlike landscape that invites the viewer to break the fourth wall. We realize that Hernán’s memories also belong to other people; we witness the perceptible manifestations of a nature that has been raped by humanity; and we contemplate the mystery that surrounds the dynamics of communication with extraterrestrial entities. Apichatpong tries to tell us that this set of situations are also part of existence. With the help of Hernán’s mature version, Jessica finds meaning in the mental sound that young Hernán materialized for her in an mp3. The sound recovers some of Jessica’s personal memories that were buried, and they also serve as a filter for Hernán’s unexplored memories. On the other hand, we begin to understand previous scenes of the film: a deforestation during the construction of a macro-tunnel; an emphasis towards the human fossils that were found during the excavations; and a vague memory of all the corpses that lay beneath the Colombian territory- a sad result of historical violence between drug cartels, guerrillas and paramilitary groups in the country.

The mind represents a strange, challenging, and never intelligible journey. After all, that’s what we are: memories, experiences, knowledge, imagination, things that we have forgotten and things that we do not understand. We can preserve memories that possibly shouldn’t be there, or that at least should rather resonate in another place or another mind. All human beings are alone, and there are moments in life when that feeling of loneliness is accentuated. For reasons that we don’t really know, Jessica is a person who feels an intense sense of isolation and detachment from the world, she is going through an endless process that the entire humanity experiences constantly: finding reasons to live.

Memoria is a meditative experience towards the abyss, towards the place where memories live and where experiences are codified. Beneath the journey that excites the senses and attacks the cinematographic conventions, we are drawn by an uncertainty that leaves us with the question: How far can you go with the things you’ve seen in this world without losing your mind?

by Octavio Carbajal González