Rent Memoria (2021)

Bland and unenchanting. - Memoria review by NP

I like slow-burning films; the idea of being given enough time to really live in the movie you are watching really appeals to me, often more so than faster-paced, spectacular projects. I also like arthouse films; the atmosphere and characters can often be just as engaging, if not more, than a traditionally linear storyline. Thing is, you need to have at least the semblance of a storyline in a film, otherwise, it’s like buying a loaf of bread and finding no bread in it!

Memoria is deliberately pitched at a snail’s pace. There isn’t a storyline as such, but rather a series of events, some of which we return to. Clearly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who writes and directs, has a vision for this – together, one would presume, with his cast and crew. For the most part, it leaves me cold, and I find myself trying to imagine how Weerasethakul initially tried to communicate what he is trying to achieve here to his actors. I actually felt the makers were taking the mickey, daring me to stick with this when they have no intention of providing much reason to, or indeed any kind of pay-off.

Some will undoubtedly tell me I don’t ‘get’ it, and that’s almost certainly true, but I can’t honestly see that there is anything *to* get, because with the suspension of disbelief fully installed, all I see here is a group of blandly inoffensive people doing very little except having whispered conversations and being desperately polite to each other in front of an unmoving camera. There were times when I had to wait for someone to blink to convince myself the BluRay hadn’t frozen. This left me cold, I’m afraid. My score is 3 out of 10 for some nicely filmed locations.

Hypnotic - Memoria review by AER

Achatipong Weerasthakul's latest film for much of it's second half evokes the feeling of being trapped in a long dream. Others will feel like they are locked in a screensaver or a boring waiting room. A botanist has moved to Bogota to be close to her ill sister, then she begins to hear a loud 'bang' inside her head that comes out of nowhere and happens infrequently. Why is this happening? We get several answers but none are confirmed, all of them make sense but I wasn't sure I had the patience to enjoy the series of long-static shots of the closing half-an-hour to reach them. If you've seen 'Uncle Boonmee Can Recall His Past Lives' then you know the style, and you're back for more - so there'll be no yawns or tears from you. Newcomers, drawn in by Tilda Swinton, and the fact that half of it is spoken in the English language may well get very bored, or want a film with a firm plot. The trailer makes this film look a lot more dramatic than it turned out to be, which will vex a lot a viewers.

Achatipong's English/Spanish language debut is very much in his style. Slow, dreamlike, mysterious. It was too languorous in pace for me but ultimately, it had a lot of doog reasons to see it.

6 out of 10

Extraordinary, meditative piece - Memoria review by PD

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's extraordinary film concerns a banging noise heard by a Scottish orchidologist (the wonderful Tilda Swinton) in the depths of Colombia, and much of the film concerns the ramifications of this apparent mental affliction. I read somewhere that the disturbing sound — which echoes over and over again during the course of the film — was inspired by something that Weerasethakul himself experienced, thereby recalling the tinnitus and other tropical maladies that Pedro Almodóvar revealed in “Pain & Glory.” But here the director turns these loud, impossible-to-anticipate aural bursts into tiny attacks, thus interrupting an otherwise largely Zen-like piece - one wonderful scene involving Jessica in a restaurant with her sister and sister's husband is particularly well-done.

Weerasethakul’s films coax images out of the darker corners of the subconscious, but do so very subtly indeed, leaving audiences to mull over their mysteries to the sounds of insects and rustling leaves. Rather than limiting himself to what can be explained by science or logic, the director embraces the so-called supernatural: spells and spirits, invisible threats and animals that seem to possess a kind of menacing power only partway understood by humans (like the dog Jessica observes wandering a public square in an especially eerie sequence). During the deliberately unhurried film's first hour and a half or so, Jessica could be a kind of 21st-century Mr. Hulot, saying little as she ambles about a surreal modern Medellín. Whilst investigating orchid-threatening fungi in the university library, Jessica meets a professor who invites her in to examine a 6,000-year-old human skeleton; at the academic’s prompting, she hesitantly stretches out a finger and probes the hole bored in the ancient skull. To citizens of the future, “modern medicine” may well seem as primitive.

There's a faintly comic section as Jessica consults a doctor, but her instincts lead her to visit one of her husband’s former students, Hernan, who works in a recording studio. It’s a sign of the film’s unhurried sense of time that, during the course of a wonderful protracted scene, Jessica tries to describe the banging as Hernan pulls samples from a library of sound effects to help re-create what she’s been hearing. Hernan then takes it upon himself to compose a piece of music that incorporates the noise, but Weerasethakul cleverly withholds the melody from us, making it one of many things that may only exist in Jessica’s head. But even the young man’s existence might be in question, as Hernan is nowhere to be found when she returns to the studio some days later. Jessica then decides to hit the road, leaving the city with its aural soup of blaring car alarms and police sirens for the untamed Amazon. The noises follow her, and so does Hernan - or maybe he’s been out there waiting for her all along, for Jessica meets a friendly local fish scaler with the same name. This last section is even slower and entirely plotless, but undoubtedly the most compelling, with the couple's connection explored very delicately, as Hernan No. 2 claims to remember everything: “That’s why I never watch movies or television,” he says. It could be that Jessica here serves as the director’s stand-in: a filmmaker questioning the power and limitations of his own medium - cinema can document things for posterity, but there’s so much it cannot capture — and when Weerasethakul finally reveals the source of the noise, the explanation is even harder to believe.

The sounds Jessica hears are for me a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed - the closing shots suggesting memory extending beyond humanity. Amazing work.