A woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, notices strange sounds. Soon she begins to think about their appearance.
Acclaimed filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s philosophical drama “Memoria” mesmerizes with sight and sound — which also happen to be its focal subject, their interconnection, a symbiosis of sorts that can trigger an emotional avalanche. Weerasethakul and his star and executive producer, Tilda Swinton, create a tranquil but subliminally unnerving experience without ever resorting to embellishments.
Swinton plays Jessica Holland, a Scottish botanist visiting her ill sister in Colombia. When a persistent clang, a sonic distortion, begins to haunt her, Jessica starts questioning its origins and perhaps her sanity. She utilizes the help of a sound engineer, who may be a figment of her imagination. Existentialism creeps in, musings on life and death and (metaphorical) rebirth, spiritualism, objects of value, how sounds can assume physical shape, and how memories become tangible when dug up by archaeologists.
The film is deeply poetic and meditative, never pretentious, favoring minute details over narrative progression. Long, hypnotic takes make one study each frame, appreciate each micro-expression, unexpected visual and — particularly — sound, from birds tweeting to lyrical dialogue puncturing the silence and, of course, the film’s nucleus, the enigmatic clang. Although a jaded audience may find the experience patience-testing, the languid pace is immersive.
Swinton holds it all together — a lesser, less mesmerizing actor may have rendered the feature impenetrable. She’s introspective and always verging on desperation, a woman on the brink of a revelation. Neither she nor the filmmaker reveals what it might be, but because everything is seen and heard through Jessica’s eyes and ears, it’s the journey that transfixes.
Weerasethakul and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom find unexpected beauty in mundanity. They make the exotic Bogota, and its surrounding jungles seem alien, accentuating Jessica’s feeling of displacement. “Memoria” may leave the viewers feeling equally displaced — and neither the star nor the filmmaker could care less.
In Select Theaters Friday, April 1st with a national rollout to follow
