Memoria (2021): An Elegy For the Future (Blu-ray Review)

The American distribution by Neon of Memoria attempted to create a never-ending release whereby it would play at a single cinema for one night only and then move on to another one. At the time of writing, this process is still more or less in place, but evidently, the pandemic mindset hasn’t been shaken enough to pull off such distribution tactics. Here in the UK, the distribution has been more straightforward with Sovereign releasing the film onto digital platforms before this special collector’s edition Blu-ray.

Marketed as director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s English language debut, even though the dominant language is Spanish, and his most accessible film to date, Memoria is nonetheless as enigmatic and metaphysical as you would expect from the mind of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It begins with our lead Jessica being woken up by a loud noise that has also set off car alarms in a nearby area. She undergoes a slow realisation that nobody else appears to hear it and so goes to a sound recordist, Hernan, to try and recreate it. He then disappears with no one remembering he ever existed and things only get stranger from there.

There is no doubt that this is capital-A Art and so your patience with this film’s meditative pacing may be shorter than mine. I found the slow steady shots mesmerising, often fixed in one spot so we are observers of a scene playing it out. It reminds me of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore and To the Ends of the Earth in showing a journey of self-discovery and taking its time doing it.

It all sounds so arty-farty when I describe it like that but Memoria is engaging and grounded, fervently trying to forge a connection with its audience. Indeed, it is a film about how we engage with Earth and the nature it produces. As Jessica undergoes her investigation, we see the earth being uncovered by archaeologists and building developers, attempting to rediscover the past and build a new future respectively but disturbing the Earth in order to do it. In contrast, Jessica meets a man who “works on the land” peacefully and sensitively, also called Hernan but with seemingly no relation to the missing sound recordist. Jessica forms such an easy and natural connection with him that she begins to perceive his memories as her own. We haven’t seen her so at ease making this moment together quietly heart-warming. It’s a moment of peace that offers hope that tranquillity can be achieved in this noisy world.

The use of natural lighting throughout adds beauty to these scenes as well as demonstrating how the filmmaking techniques are determined by the film’s themes. As a mysterious noise is a major plot point, the sound design is necessarily tuned into such an approach. It’s a testament to sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr that Jessica’s attempt to describe the noise as “earthy…like a rumble from the core of the earth” resembles what we hear. Then again, as Hernan explains when he tries to recreate the sound, how you listen to the sound affects it, so the film is able to cheat slightly; if an audience member feels that what we hear doesn’t match what Jessica describes, they’re just not listening in the right way. Indeed, there is a metafictional touch in the sound being recreated from a library of movie sound effects. The suggestion is that it is impossible to reproduce something that seemingly originates organically.

As you can imagine from the plot, there is a light air of absurdity throughout and the film’s final moments may feel like a ridiculous punchline. A doctor that Jessica meets casually comments, “In this town, many people have hallucinations,” and it is easy to dismiss this film with a similarly rational approach. You could fairly ask why it tells this story so slowly and take so long to get to its concluding revelation, but, and again at the risk of sounding pretentious, finding the answer isn’t the point, it’s the experience of discovering it. I found watching Memoria like watching a musical where you pay attention to how scenes are set up purely to overwhelm you with sound. Not chaotic noise, specific sounds that catch your attention and draw you into a world that feels just out of reach. Tilda Swinton in the lead role under Weerasethakul‘s direction are perfect guides through this mesmerising film, sharing an experience with us that will linger however you feel about it.

Memoria