MEMORIA AT THE ARTS PICTUREHOUSE
Is memory a blessing or a curse? I have always been blessed with a poor memory so am never the subject of maudlin nostalgia. I also have the lucky power to forget the forgettable. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s movie, Memoria, the main character played by Tilda Swinton has the curse of remembering too much – especially when the memories crowding inside her head are not even her own.
The film begins with a long take (the first of many interminable ones) of a curtain in a darkened room. It is night in Bogota. Suddenly we hear a loud resonant bang – very short, very contained. A figure awakes, it is Jessica (played if that is the right word, by Swinton). She is confused by the sudden sound and spends the rest of the film trying to find the source. The scene slowly shifts to a dowdy car park in which away from human gaze (except sadly ours), there is a cacophony of car alarms which stay shrieking until some automatic stop button kicks in.
I have just described the first ten minutes of this 136 minute movie. To call it long is a severe understatement. In Weerasethakul’s world, slow is good, slow is art. In Woody Allen’s only ‘serious’ film, Interiors, his trademark wisecracks, comic/tragic insights into human folly are replaced by a series of very still, long-held frames and snail-paced tracking shots. He attributed Interiors to his hero Ingmar Bergman, he of the Scandi film noir et blanc. Weerasethakul is clearly in the same cold wasteland as Bergman except here he has moved the (in)action to rainy hot Colombia. Jessica, a po-faced British botanist is living in the South American country whose mysterious tropical landscapes have seeped into her brain. Or have they? Every ten minutes or so, between those languid takes of Jess reading a book, watching the rain, listening to a song (all of it), something strange happens: another bang that no one else can hear, people who exist one moment but not the next, that sort of thing. It all leads Jessica to find the source of her audial experiences in a remote clearing in the jungle where a mysterious stranger is found de-scaling fish. Here the wisdom of the ancients is revealed and then an ending so astonishingly out of character that I thought I had woken up in a Wes Andersen film (probably The Life Aquatic except that was a vastly superior movie).
In a following filmed Q and A with director Weerasethakul and Swinton, the Guardian’s critic Peter Bradshaw, gently tried to probe the thinking behind this filmic glacier. He was far too polite or perhaps intimidated by Tilda’s equally glacial stare (was she playing herself in the movie). She told Bradshaw that for her, the movie meant she could throw off all the trimmings of ‘that acting thing’ and just ‘experience’. It is true that Swinton makes no effort in bringing Jessica alive but limits her presence to yes, a presence. She is sort of there but not there. That is fine for a short film, or a video artwork but for 136 minutes of largely still images, that is taking the Pissarro.
The overly gracious Bradshaw tentatively asked the director if the term ‘slow film’ meant anything to him. Weerasethakul said it didn’t and Swinton coldly stroked the head of her dog who had mysteriously crept into the frame. Bradshaw quickly changed subject and went on to that old chestnut beloved of timid interviewers; ‘What are your plans for the future’?
The film is too knowingly profound and at times unintentionally funny in a Pseud’s Corner way. The idea that every rock and blade of grass contains all the memories of what they have ‘witnessed’ is nothing new but could make the basis of an intriguing movie – one at either half the length or twice the speed (preferably both). As it stands, luckily (for me) Memoria is a film I will quickly forget.
