Five stars for the unclassifiable new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
At first it was the sound, not the image. It is not a trivial finding, because it would be the zero degree of a new way of reinterpreting the history of cinema, which is none other than what Weerasethakul does in his dazzling ‘Memory’. Not only cinema, but also the world: understand it according to its vibrations and frequencies, not according to what is visible. It is, therefore, about turning sound into a tactile, kinesthetic fracture that can connect the times of the human and the post-human in a wandering figure, an antenna of flesh and blood (a mesmeric Tilda Swinton) that travels, from the urban to rural (as usual in Thai cinema), to find a very serene version of ‘Funes, el memorioso’, and finally Apichatpong’s film –which is, yes, a fundamental experience to understand the future of audiovisual contemporary– becomes an absolutely hypnotic cross between the work of Borges and ‘Encounters in the Third Phase’.
The director of ‘Tropical Malady’ has taken advantage of his Colombian adventure to to strip his style of all artifice, as if only through this purification we could access the sounds behind the images, which the words model as a sculpture (the extraordinary scene of the sound studio) so that we learn to live with the supernatural, getting used to the tinnitus of the memories of the world, when it was just a hole in space, a well of unfathomable energy. The question is: how have we lived without ‘Memory’ until now?
For those who believe in sound as a new image
DATA SHEET
Address: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Distribution: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Diaz, Jeanne Balibar, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Juan Pablo Urrego Original title: Costa Brava, Lebanon Country: Colombia, Thailand, United Kingdom, Mexico, France, Germany, Qatar Year: 2022 Release date: 27–05-2022 Gender: Drama Script: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Duration: 139 minutes
Synopsis: Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British botanist living in Colombia, is woken up one night by a sound from another world. The protagonist embarks on a journey to the heart of the jungle in search of the origin of this noise that only she seems to hear, and there she finds a man who treasures all the memory of the place.
Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.