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Experiencing memory, remembering experience: Some remarks on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria”
Tilda Swinton’s film career is saturated with the weird and wonderful. Her broad range, and excellence across that range, is unquestionable. One has only to think that the same person has brought to life Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and C.S. Lewis’ White Witch — or is now a part of the antithetical canons of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Wes Anderson. Her career is a shining example of how finely one actor can navigate realism and fantasy.
No wonder, then, that she so expertly handles the blending of the two in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, which is magical realism at its most soporific, contradictory and anti-intellectual. I mean this all in a good way. The film, to my mind, acts as a prismatic exploration of the different functions of memory, and how we access memory through emotional experience. I shall attempt to shine a light through this prism in the following remarks.
The film is almost impossible to summarise — the plot is nowhere to be found online — but for the sake of clarity later, here is a full synopsis (fittingly written from memory).
Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish woman visiting her ill sister in Bogotá. We begin the film with her asleep, in a dimly lit room with not even the slightest movement on screen for what feels like five minutes. Her sleep is interrupted by a sudden, loud, textured sound. She rises slowly from bed and inches to another room. She thinks the sound is down to building work next door, but things get complicated when she hears the noise again at random moments, and realises no one else can hear it. Reality seems to be decomposing for Jessica, as the film follows her on a journey of almost unconnected experiences. She attempts to have Hernán, a young sound engineer, replicate the mysterious sound for her; she later tries to revisit Hernán, but he seems never to have existed. She comes across an impromptu jazz ensemble, interacts with archaeologists piecing together 6,000-year-old skeletons, and seeks help from a Christian doctor for her uneasiness and lack of sleep.
In the final stretch of the film, she encounters an old man called Hernán, played by the superb Elkin Díaz, who matches Swinton’s impeccable screen presence and elevates the…
