Feeling Memoria

I can’t really say that this is a “review” of Memoria. I only write because I love this film so much and I want to write down how I feel about it.

What is Memoria about? You can sum it the story up as a Scottish woman, Jessica, searches for the origin of a mysterious exploding sound in her head in Colombia. However, it is not what this movie is really about. To answer that question, perhaps it’s just like the scene where Jessica triied to describe this sound to the sound engineer Hernán. She uses many vocabularies, reference, and metaphors, first in Spanish and then in English, but it still feels inaccurate. I guess, to describe a sensation in your head with the logic of language can feel like catching air with your hand. I often question the meaning of language-based communication myself. As Chris Marker asked in Sans Soleil, “how do you remember thirst?” In the end, Memoria is not trying to tell a story. Memoria is an experience itself. In some way, it is closer to the experience of a video game. Perhaps that’s why I love it so much.

In an interview in New York Film Festival, Tilda Swinton explained that Jessica is not a character but a “predicament”. As a Scottish in Colombia, Jessica feels “dislocated but connected”: only she can hear that mysterious sound among all people; the sound engineer Hernán who helps her recreating this sound suddenly disappears as if he never exists; her memories are misplaced: people that she thinks dead turn out to be alive according to others; and her language is misplaced as well: the scene where she fails to describe the sound in Spanish is one of the best scenes ever made. In Apichatpong’s signature long take, all the mysteries and anecdotes become mundane routine. They feel just like the glass of water you need to drink when you get up from bed every day, or the deli downstairs you need to pass every day. One of the magic about a long take is that you must pay all your attention to a one single framing: what is in this framing, what is not and what is going to happen. You give it all your expectation and imagination and you’ll have to accept all the satisfaction or disappointment.

There is a scene where Jessica passes a music studio, and you can hear beautiful music coming out from the studio. Apichatpong uses a long take of a static shot focusing on Jessica looking at the band, but he doesn’t show what the band looks like. As we can only see the action of Jessica looking, the curiosity about what the band looks like grows. With the music in your ear, a very vague image of the band starts to form. So, the image of Jessica looking, and the imaginative image of the band would overlap in your mind. It feels very interesting when the film finally cuts to the actual band playing. Thereal band now seems unreal because it doesn’t quite match the image in your head. However, at the same time, such misplacement feels not only natural and legitimate, but also enhancing audience’s senses about “reality”, as if a frosted glass gets removed in front of you, and it is the first time that you can see and hear the world so clearly. It is a very weird but magical feeling. When you think about the film’s title, Memoria, isn’t this how we feel when we investigate the image of our own memory?

Apichatpong is always very good at using soundscape to build up another dimension outside the image you see. Memoria feels even more so. For example, the sound of the environment, as known as white noise, feels almost enhanced in most scenes. As the audience get used to the white noise, the silence appearing toward the end of the film becomes a portal to another world.  In another scene, Hernán describe a story to Jessica, which he “reads” from a stone: two guys not only steal another guy’s lunch, but also beat him up later. In the next static, long take where Hernán has his hand on Jessica’s hand, in which we later know that in this way Jessica can directly read Hernán’s memory, we can hear the actual digestive sounds from this story. As soon as these sound come up, the characters and all the actions are suddenly visualized in my head. Combining with the sound of waves and jungle, Apichatpong constructs an image of the memory of the earth and time traveling with only the use of soundscape.

Another enchanting spell Apichatpong’s films cast all the time is the vague and dreamy connections between different scenes. It almost feels like some scenes connect to each other, as if they were before and after life. At the beginning of the Memoria, Jessica’s sister tells Jessica that her sickness might come from a dying dog at her place. And in another nighttime scene on the street, a unknown stray dog follows Jessica. While she tries to get rid of it, the dog keeps following until she stops to stare at it. Then the dog just leaves like it was a coincidence. After that, Jessica’s sister seems not to remember she had mentioned the dog at all after she recover. Is there really a dog? What does this dog mean? What is the truth? Nothing is explained but it also feels like it doesn’t need to be. The same trick is applied to other symbols throughout different scenes: the archeology remains and site, and even Hernán himself. And the mysterious big bang in Jessica’s head is like a thread that links all the beads, an ultimate question that haunts you throughout the whole film. All questions will be answered once Jessica finds out the source of the mysterious sound. And the existential crisis and problems in life can also be resolved (and it does at the end).

Like watching other Apichatpong’s film, I fell asleep a little bit when watching Memoria (especially because I watched it after a meal). There is a static scene where Hernán just sleeps on the grass next to Jessica, and he sleeps as if he was dead. I heard that yawn can be infectious but perhaps Hernan’s sleepiness is infectious as well. I fell asleep in the theatre with Hernán. I didn’t know how long I had slept. But when I open my eyes again, Hernan was still sleeping in the exact same position, still like dead, as if time has never passed. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I fell asleep at all. If I did, for how long? 5 seconds or 1 minute? Did I miss anything in the film? At that moment, I found myself just like Jessica. Memory is no longer reliable, reality is no longer sensible, and questions no longer have answers, or they don’t need answers at all. Memoria has this magic power. In these two-hour timespans inside the black box, the boundary between reality and cinema become unrecognizable.

When I tell my friend that I think Memoria is one of the best films ever made, they couldn’t understand. Perhaps I overrated it as well for some personal reason. When I first got to know Apichatpong’s works, it was back in 2013 when I worked as an intern in my ex’s gallery in Shanghai. I was 23 and he was 31. I was a college graduate boy who didn’t know anything, and he was well acclaimed curator and gallerist who worked with international artists. His gallery opening exhibition included Apichatpong’s work. That was how I knew this Thai director and his reputation in the art world. I remember watching Tropical Malady at my ex’s apartment, and of course, I fell asleep. After we broke up, I went back to Guangzhou, and I watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at my home. I thought it was good, but I still fell asleep and couldn’t fully understand the magic of his films. After I moved to New York, I watched Cemetery of Splendor in IFC. I remembered some scenes very well, but still, I maybe fell asleep for like 10 or 15 mins. When I finally understand and deeply appreciate Apichatpong’s film this time, I am 31-year-old myself, the same age when I knew my ex. To me, trying to understand Apichatpong’s movie is always a little bit personal. Deep down, maybe I am trying to reconnect to myself from the past, or maybe to reconcile.

Some might say it is unfair, or too subjective, to rate a film for personal cause. But are there any films that aren’t personal? In many interviews, Apichatpong mentioned that many Bogota local audience cried watching Memoria because there are elements that connect to the local memory and history. For example, there is a scene where you just hear a gunshot that comes from nowhere on a busy street without any contexts. Only local audience will relate this scene to the collective memory of Bogota’s past, when there were gangsters, gun fights all the time in public space. In 2017, before he made the film, Apichatpong traveled around Colombia and researched on local history and memory. There are certain elements in Memoria that local audience will react to differently than foreign audience. As Guillermo de Toro commented on Alfonso’s Roma, “at its highest function, cinema is memory.” Different people will react to the same film differently. To me, one of the most beautiful things can happen is a personal connection that you grow with a film, that the film becomes a part of your life. Films make people feel connected and less lonely. That is the reason why cinema has always been fascinating aourd the world for more than a century.

Apichatpong and Tilda Swinton have been wanting to work together for a very long time. But it is very difficult, because Apichatpong has only worked in Thailand before, his home where he connects to deeply, and such intense connection reflects on all his previous films. In the interview during New York Film Festival, they both agreed that they couldn’t find space for Tilda Swinton in Thailand, and that they need to find a place where they both are strangers to so that they can work together. In the end, Memoria is a film about memory and misplacement, from preproduction, to production and distribution. Neon decides to release Memoria as a never-ending, traveling art exhibition: “moving from city to city, theater to theater, week by week, playing in front of only one solitary audience at any time.” And it will never be available on DVD, on demand, or streaming platforms. A friend found this strategy a bit obnoxious because it creates “a false scarcity”. Perhaps, but living in a time when millions of videos and films, or maybe I should say “contents”, are right at your fingertips, scarcity might not be a bad thing to have. The experience of waiting and slowly building up expectations of a film feels like a long-lost virtue. I love this releasing strategy because Memoria is an experience that belongs only to the dark theater. I will be upset if any of my friends watch this film on their computers. This strategy also opens the possibility that, if I am lucky, I can watch Memoria in another city in the future. By that time, I might grow more, and the memory of this film might fade. I might have left New York. Maybe I’ll have the chance to watch it in Mexico City, or maybe even in Bogota. What will it feel like to watch this film again in that time and that space?