Table Talk: Memoria (2021)

Aren: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s last feature film, Cemetery of Splendour, was largely about a group of Thai soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness. They were prisoners of the dreaming world. Memoria, Joe’s celebrated new film, is about a character trapped in the waking world. Clearly, the sleeping world and what bleeds out of dreams into our waking day continues to fascinate Joe, but it’s the absence of sleep that transfixes our attention in Memoria.

Suffering from a mental issue in which she hears a loud, guttural, explosive noise at random intervals, known as “exploding head syndrome,” Tilda Swinton’s Jessica searches for answers across Colombia, but doesn’t find any easy ones. Of course, being a film by Joe, Memoria is not about a narrative progression in the way most films are. There is a plot, which follows Jessica from Bogota to a small village in the jungle as she tries to figure out the source and meaning of the noise in her head, but the tension of that central mystery does not propel Memoria like a conventional film.

Rather, Memoria is a sensory experience. It invites us to enter into Jessica’s headspace and experience the world as she does. And the result is a profound, quietly exhilarating film and one of the best cinematic experiences of the past year.

Anders: When I say that Memoria was one of the greatest cinema going experiences I’ve had in ages, it’s not just because of the limitations the pandemic has placed on theatrical experiences. The sensory experience of the film that you describe has the potential, if one has eyes to see and ears to hear, to awaken or re-awaken us to the world outside ourselves.

In this sense, your invocation of sleeping and dreaming is appropriate, though it’s a dream that makes us more aware of our connection and place in the world, not less. It prompts us to consider our connection to our senses and how we make memories.

For all the ways that Memoria is something new among his feature films, taking Joe beyond Thailand to Colombia (this is his first feature shot outside his home country), it is still recognizably one of his films through and through. And thus its exploration of the relationship between cinema and the senses, between cinema and its ability to recreate the sensory experience of day-to-day life, is of a piece with something Joe has always aimed for in his films. 

There is a quote from him, cited in James Quandt’s 2010 book on the director for the Austrian Film Museum, where Joe says “Our brain is the best camera and projector. If only we can find a way to operate it properly.” It’s an approach to art that suggests that by working with these tools and forms that allow us to approximate human experience, we can somehow try to understand ourselves better. Memoria, in its central…I hesitate to call it a mystery, as if it were a puzzle with a solution. Perhaps enigma is better. Anyway, the film’s central enigmatic sound, and Jessica’s quest to understand it and its relationship to her and the world around her, takes her to sound studios and recording engineers, but ultimately into the small jungle village and a person who has made his life a kind of living repository of memory. It is the understanding of the variety of human sensory experiences, and stories, that make up memory, and ultimately offers continuity to our sense of self that Joe continues to explore in his films.

Joe’s Use of Sound

Aren: Memoria has one of the most entrancing audioscapes of any movie I’ve seen in recent years. Joe has always made quiet movies. Some of his movies are meditative, bordering on sleepy, which is fitting for a director who demands so much attention from his audience. The frame is typically still and the characters are quiet; if there are audible sound effects, they are wind or rain or the rustling of leaves on the trees. This approach is necessary as more noise would distract from the moment.

Anders: Yes, I agree his films often use sound to draw our attention to our immersion in nature or the day-to-day hustle and bustle of the city. I always think of that opening sequence in Mysterious Object at Noon of the advertising truck winding its way through Bangkok as using sound to establish a sense of place.

Aren: But Memoria is different. It’s still quiet and patient, with characters rarely speaking in more than a hushed voice and an unhurried pacing to the line deliveries or action on screen. However, the quiet puts us at ease, making us vulnerable to the explosive intrusion of the sound in Jessica’s head, which is all-consuming on the surround sound at the cinema.

In my review of Cemetery of Splendor, I wrote that Joe “favours long takes, wordless sequences, and the absence of music or sound effects. He often has one image bleed into the next and rarely lets the editing speak in anything more than a whisper, as if to harshly cut between two images would wake the viewer from his film’s spell.” Joe consciously works against this approach in Memoria, using the concussive sound to break through the otherwise somnambulant atmosphere. It’s arresting and creates a transfixing tension throughout the movie, as you are calmed by the sedate discussions on screen and gentle imagery of Colombia, but also aware that the sound can break through that peace at any time. It creates a palpable tension that I cannot recall in another Joe film, although I have not seen all his works.

Anders: Memoria had me literally at the edge of my seat at times, straining to hear everything, even with the excellent sound at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. This wasn’t because it was too quiet, but because it invited me into its world rather than pummelled me into submission. There are moments where the sound definitely provides almost a “jump scare,” when the film first introduces the concussive sound of Jessica’s EHS. But it’s not immediately clear what the relationship between the sound and the rest of the world is.

What did you think of that early scene, after Jessica is awake puzzling at the mysterious sound, when the sound has seemed to trigger the car alarms in the early dawn car park one by one? It suggests to me that even if the sound is in Jessica’s head, there is a connection to the world around her as well. Sound is related to our sense of touch. It is physical. Palpable as you say.

Aren: Opening scenes tell us so much about a film. They teach you how to watch a movie and what that movie is about. So, the early scene in Memoria is instructive. It introduces us to the sound and how it can intrude on Jessica (and us) at any moment. Thus, it prepares us for the tension of the film’s formal approach. But it also instructs us about the film’s interests, about the link between dreaming and waking, how the scene is a literal wake-up call, as the sound wakes up Jessica, but then also as if it’s a wake-up call to the physical world that surrounds her. As you say, the editing makes it seem like the sound activates the car alarms, which are essentially urban rooster calls in marking the coming of the day and the return of life to the world. By cutting from the bedroom to the parking lot, Joe is telling us that the effects of that sound within Jessica’s head are not isolated. The sound is inside her head, but it can lead to an awareness of what exists outside her head.

Dreamscape

Aren: Waking and dreaming, past and present, life and death, body and spirit, this world and other worlds—Joe is often playing in the liminal space between these dimensions in his films. Here, he has a sound that seems to break through from one side to the other, and follows a character who is using this sound as a window to the larger world. Jessica’s conversations with the second Hernán (Elkin Díaz) investigate this very notion as he is able to sleep without dreaming, tapping into the world of the dead.

Anders: The Hernán of the village is almost a kind of Uncle Boonmee figure, the character in Joe’s Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Hernán likewise is deeply connected to something that others are not about the world around him. In this case, rather than personalize this as past lives, it is the memories and stories of the past, which become audible for Jessica after spending time in Hérnan’s small apartment.

Hérnan seems to remember everything, even Jessica’s memories. As he says, because he remembers everything, he must limit what he sees and hears. Here the film recalls for me the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, the Memorious,” about a man for whom his perfect memory becomes paralyzing.

Aren: Do you know if that story is a direct influence on the film? Have you read any mention of it in interviews?

Anders: I have not read of any direct influence, but I’m not the only critic to notice it. I find the connection between Latin American literature and Asian filmmakers interesting. For instance, Wong Kar Wai has mentioned the literature of Manuel Puig as an influence on his films, especially the Argentine-set Happy Together (which turns 25 this year!).

Anomalies

Aren: Joe seems transfixed by the “anomalous,” which happens to dovetail nicely with my current obsessions. I’m currently watching The X-Files and reading Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial, about the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which Loeb argues was possibly the first evidence of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe. The book’s third chapter is titled “Anomalies,” as it addresses the various anomalous elements of ‘Oumuamua that make it likely to be extraterrestrial. Joe’s films are full of anomalies, especially Memoria, which has fewer ghosts than his past films (although Hernán could possibly be classified that way), but which is still obsessed with the ways that mundane life exposes the fractures in normal, understandable life.

Anders: I think that’s definitely a good way to phrase it: anomalies. Joe’s films have always toyed with what Western critics usually phrase as “genre elements.” Ghosts and spirits as you note, a key element of Uncle Boonmee, Tropical Malady, and Cemetery of Splendor, but also strange spaces and voids, like the black hole in Syndromes and a Century and the “Zone-like” space by the river visited in Blissfully Yours, the jungle littered with gas masks and canisters suggesting some kind of science fictional disaster. The anomalies in Memoria connect explicitly to elements in Syndromes and a Century—the scene of monks playing with a remote control flying saucer in that film brought down censorship from Thai authorities— and the story of the flying saucer in Mysterious Object at Noon.

One thing that I’ve written about Joe’s films is that they are interested in breaking down the distinction between modernity and what might be seen as fantastical and or spiritual beliefs. They push us to consider what elements of the world around us, what “anomalies,” might be remnants of other ways of thinking or being.

Aren: Yes, the anomalous has as much to do with time as it does with space, how the realities of the world in the past are still accessible in the present, even if only as trace memories, such as the ones Hernán possesses.

Of course, the film is also at least partially interested in linking our world with worlds beyond us, and not just in a spiritual or temporal sense. Spoilers incoming for the rare person to read this far without having seen Memoria, but I also bring up Extraterrestrial and the notion of the anomalous because Joe incorporates aliens into this very story. 

Late in the film, we discover the noise is actually the sound produced by an alien spacecraft lifting off from the Colombian jungle. The sound seems to reverberate out of the jungle and into Jessica’s head, fracturing our easy understanding of the world and our place in the cosmos. Immediately, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Ash Is Purest White came to mind, as Jia incorporates UFOs into those movies in small, ancillary chapters. Fittingly, Jia is listed as an executive producer on Memoria, so it’s obvious the two directors share similar interests.

Anders: Yes, I definitely thought of the scene in Still Life. Somehow these two directors, who I do think share some real commonalities, are able to incorporate these elements without them seeming trite or shoehorned in. They aren’t a joke, but they also aren’t trying to make some grand statement about how the world “really is.” It’s an experience that some people have. For Jessica, this strange sound is really from another world, but she is still connected to it.

Aren: It also taps into the notion of what the anomalous means to different people at different times. In the past, the source of the sound might have been portrayed as a ghost or a spirit. That is how people described the anomalies they observed in everyday life. Obviously, Joe still incorporates these into his films in the present, but we are very much a culture of scientific obsession these days, even speaking transnationally. So aliens are a modern way that we’ve come to explain away anomalies through some kind of tangentially scientific manner. Aliens would exist in our own universe and be bound to our own laws of physics, but they are an unknowable element of an often unknowable universe. Joe’s films, and Memoria specifically, try to bridge these gaps, connect us to the inexplicable, the anomalies in our lives, and have us emotionally ponder the mysteries that lie in everyday life.

Memoria (2021, Thailand/Colombia/UK/France/Germany/Mexico/China/Taiwan/United States/Qatar/Switzerland)

Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; starring Tilda Swinton, Elkin Díaz, Jeanne Balibar, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Giménez Cacho.

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