In the middle of the night, Jessica hears a noise—loud and a little metallic, somewhere between a bang and a thud. Later, in a conversation with a young sound engineer named Hernán, she will describe it as a large ball of concrete bouncing against a metal wall, surrounded by seawater, a remarkably vivid image that Hernán patiently tries to synthesize.
Jessica, a British expatriate living in Colombia played by Tilda Swinton, refers to what she heard as “my sound” – “mi sonido” in Spanish – and it seems to exist only for her ears. Or rather for her and the audience watching ‘Memoria’, the enigmatic and enchanting new film from Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The noise startles Jessica over dinner with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and follows her from Bogotá to a small town in the mountains. The possibility that it’s an auditory hallucination is raised at one point, and there are other times when the reliability of Jessica’s perception seems to be in question. Is Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) a figment of her imagination? If so, how could he have offered her a refrigerator for the orchids she grows on her farm in Medellín?
Even though Jessica visits a country doctor and asks for Xanax to help her sleep – the doctor offers Jesus as a safer, more effective treatment – her psychological state isn’t really what “Memoria” is about. Say exactly what it is is over poses a dilemma that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Each scene unfolds with quiet, minute clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only adds to the mystery.
Whenever you think you have a handle on where the story is going, the ground shifts. Jessica is stunned by the noise and other vaguely similar phenomena, but she doesn’t appear to be delusional, or even overly alarmed. She is curious and cautiously questions people she meets – notably an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) and a second, older Hernán (Elkin Díaz) – about their work and its possible relevance to her situation. The film works in a similar vein, following an invisible map to a surprising destination.
Along the way, Weerasethakul pauses to reflect on the remnants of ancient civilizations and the chaos of modern life, as flickers of supernaturalism, disrupted chronology, science fiction and the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate Jessica’s journey.
The director, whose previous films are largely set in Thailand, has long been interested in the visual, social and metaphysical contrasts between urban and rural areas. His urban spaces, such as the university where the first Hernán works and the hospital where Jessica’s sister is a patient, tend to be austere and institutional, governed less by commerce or political authority than by science and technology. The Southeast Asian jungles in his “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” – and the lush Andean mountainside where the second Hernán makes his home – are magical zones, where the modern distinction between myth and fact does not. apply.
This doesn’t make Weerasethakul quite a magical realist, though the South American setting of ‘Memoria’ might make that description particularly tempting. His imagination is philosophical and speculative, and in style he is more of a poet than a fabulist, at home in the gaps between our different ways of understanding the world.
His refusal to explain can be challenging, and “Memoria” requires patience and attention. I found it an emotionally painful and intellectually satisfying experience, but not one that I can easily summarize or classify, in part because the sense of radical insecurity—Jessica’s feeling, as well as mine—was a little too real. Her gradual detachment from any stable sense of reality and her persistence in spite of that disruption seem perfectly familiar to me, even if the causes of her estrangement remain elusive. I am haunted by the plight of the second Hernán, a man blessed and cursed with a miraculous memory that links him to a universe of suffering, even as it condemns him to a state of isolation.
Swinton and Díaz are subtle, charismatic performers, and their scenes together, which make up most of the latter part of the film, take it to a new level of intensity. What happens between Jessica and Hernán, and the series of images that follow, represent a quiet, mind-blowing moment of cinema, something that’s just as wild and argument-provoking now as the ending of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was in 1968. .
You have to see it to believe it, and to see it you have to go to a movie theater. “Memoria” opens this week in New York, then makes its way across the country, cinema by cinema. It’s worth the wait, and the journey.
Memories
Rated PG. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.