OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
If we follow the latitude of northern Thailand around the globe, where Apichatpong Weerasethakul has shot so many of his feature films, it passes well above Bogota, the capital of Colombia, which is almost on the Equator. . But it is not an addition of tussiness and luxuriance that the author of Tropical Malady went looking so far from home. Memoria is a film often bathed in a gray, urban light, in which the figures are bundled up. Bogota is so high on the mountain, and when the film leaves the metropolis it will be for Pijao, a small town so high up.
It would be too simple to attribute the mutation of the universe of Apichatpong Weerasethakul to this climate change alone. It’s tempting, however, because throughout these two hours of travel, we will find all the fascinations of the filmmaker – the mysteries of sleep and catalepsy, the blurring of the borders between wakefulness and dreams, the rot that organisms such as objects, the flight from the city to the forest, unexpected (but perfectly controlled) slippages in another genre (here science fiction) wins.
The genius of the place offers the possibility of other combinations. While preventing him (a little) from exploring the history of this land or its immediate reality, the director’s quality of foreigner allows him to have new experiences, including collaboration with actors from different cultures and traditions. different, the Briton Tilda Swinton, the French Jeanne Balibar, the Spaniard established in Mexico Daniel Gimenez Cacho, the Colombian Elkin Diaz. May the faithful who are worried about seeing their favorite filmmaker sink into the murky waters of international co-productions, be reassured: more cerebral, less tactile than his predecessors, Memoria remains an unparalleled experience in contemporary cinema, a speculative dream that shakes up certainties and sets in motion both emotion and thought.
From words to senses
The doubt is the one that seizes Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) when, the evening of her arrival in Bogota, she is awakened by a muffled detonation. She is the only one to have heard it, in this family apartment. While she came to Bogota to settle the estate of her late husband, an orchid grower in Medellin, Jessica launches into an investigation into the origin of this noise. One of the most beautiful sequences of Memoria leads her to a recording studio where a young sound engineer named Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) digitally reconstructs this mysterious noise from Jessica’s description. This dialogue takes the phenomenon from words to senses, a process familiar to Apichatpong Weerasethakul cinema regulars. This time the magician takes the trouble to reveal his method, and even if it is necessary to go through the vertical bars that digitized sound forms on a computer, this one does not lose any of its mystery. Especially since, when Jessica returns to the studio, no one will have ever heard of Hernan.
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