memoria (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

I picked the perfect evening to go and watch Memoria. There are some days in your life when you want nothing more than to be plunged into a dense, visionary spectacle. Memoria delivered in spades. Only the goofiest, most irreverent of creators gets to smash the system with so much glee. In which regard this film made me think of other Latin based films which somehow manage to interrogate the edge-of-life feeling which the islands of life and empty spaces lend to Latin America, those being the films of Reygadas and the recently viewed Latin excursion of Wong Kar Wai.

I don’t know why Apichatpong chose to film in Colombia, but in so many ways it works. From the flash scene of kids dancing in the square of a remote town to the moment a man falls to the floor in Medellin, scared he has been shot, and then starts running, the film locates pinpricks of Colombian life that pepper the movie, that make it feel it is of that place, despite the multinational creative team. The scene set in the uni courtyard is another, as is Swinton’s character just drifting into a jazz rehearsal in a cramped room, with other students watching with blank but attentive faces. The detail feels both improvised and pitch perfect. Something that surprised me about the film, was the sly humour which Swinton embraces as well, with several scenes provoking an entirely unexpected laughter.

Memoria is a quest film, as Swinton goes looking for the source of her auditory hallucination and finds that it was either to do with someone hiding under a bed in a remote tropical village or it was the departure of an alien spaceship, or both. It is also, one supposes, a premonition of a death she has already lived. At some points it could almost be said that everything gets a bit M Night Shyamalan, not that anyone else would probably think that.

Don’t watch this film at home unless you are properly stoned, or it is the middle of the night when nothing and no-one is going to disturb you. If possible, watch it in on a vast screen in a near empty sala. Let the sounds disconcert you. Strain to hear every word. Watch Tilda’s face become a mask of Tilda’s face. Watch the dead walk amongst you. Dream about your origins as you ride the clouds with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in no particular hurry to discover where you are going or where you have come from.