Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021) (Patreon)

Q: What if the machine kicked back?

I've needed some time to think about Memoria. Although there is no mistaking this film for the work on anyone else, it is indeed a change-up for Apichatpong. Not only does this film star an Academy Award winning actor (Tilda Swinton); it finds the director decamping to Colombia, a bold move for a filmmaker whose peerless work has up to now been intimately connected to the history and geography of his native Thailand. The results are never less than enthralling, and yet it raises certain questions about the portability of the "Joe Effect." Are his themes and techniques so universal as to be applicable in any conceivable locale?

Yes and no. Colombia is not Thailand, but both nations have experienced violence and political turmoil over the last few centuries. If Apichatpong's great subject is the invisibility of trauma, the way that we coexist with the troubled spirits of the past, then it's possible that there is no place on earth that would not at least somewhat accommodate Joe's aesthetic investigations. But at the same time, by casting Swinton as Jessica, a Scottish flower grower who lives in Medellin, the director underlines the problem of displacement and translation. 

While one could make a strong case that Memoria is another ghost story, Apichatpong also introduces a significant new element: the palpability of sound. It's the most abstract of the human senses that cinema can explore, a set of vibrations that pierce the skull, perceptible from a distance as well as up close. In Memoria, Joe introduces the idea of Jessica as an "antenna," a uniquely tuned receiver of vibrations that emanate from other planes of reality. And with its aggressive, chest-rattling use of sound design, Memoria essentially turns us into antennae as well. In his previous films, Apichatpong has visualized the lingering presence of the past, the ghosts that permeate our reality. Here, using sound instead, he momentarily exits the realm of costuming and special effects, replacing the objective, shared visions of spectres -- the forest spirits of Tropical Malady, the dogman of Uncle Boonmee, etc. -- with a set of sonic booms. We all experience these sounds in common, but they cannot be pointed to, they evaporate almost immediately, and we can not be entirely sure whether everyone else is experiencing them in the same way we do.

Despite having a clear set of dominant themes, the film exhibits an episodic tendency, almost as though Apichatpong were assembling it from extended, nearly-independent sequences . The primary through-line -- Jessica meeting not one but two men named Hernán in her attempts to understand the thundering sound disrupting her life -- is disrupted by otherwise unrelated business, such as Jessica's visit to an art gallery, wandering through Bogotá, or meeting her sister and brother-in-law for dinner. 

But on reflection, the film's occasional movement away from "the noise problem" may be Apichatpong's way of mimicking the mostly intangible force of the Big Sound. It isn't just that it may be in Jessica's head. (Since the film is partly inspired by a real-life malady, "exploding head syndrome," a purely private etiology of the mega-thump is certainly possible.) It's that the very nature of cinema presumes a shared visual content, with its sightlines and unidirectional seating, whereas audio is a kind of somatic supplement, a phenomenon we may share but cannot fully articulate in social terms. This may be why the sound studio sequence, in which Jessica works with Hernán One (Juan Pablo Urrego) to replicate the boom through trial and error -- Jessica describes, Hernán offers an example -- is so awkwardly comical. Apichatpong is displaying the process by which sounds are created for the cinema, which is always an approximation of some elusive ideal. 

Near the conclusion of Memoria, when Jessica encounters Hernán Two (Elkin Díaz), we see Joe making the pivot that in some ways exemplifies his aesthetic philosophy. The sound is explained as something that Jessica can perceive because she is attuned to a particular spiritual wavelength. The older Hernán suffers from his own malady, an eidetic memory that overloads his consciousness. Unable to forget, Hernán can only minimize his sensory input, staying within his small home and garden and engaging in repetitive activities. Like film, Hernán records the world indiscriminately. Jessica is able to see his entire life, through the same sympathetic osmosis that allows her to hear the rumbling of the cosmos while everyone else just goes about their lives. 

Memoria, it seems, is about the difficulty of materializing the unseen. It is a world that Apichatpong has created, and into which he has placed Jessica, his perfect spectator.