The Thai filmmaker with a difficult-to-pronounce and even harder-to-write name and surname Apichatpong Weerasethakul (how do you even read that?) Is one of the favorites of world film critics, but his hermetic slow-moving works have so far failed. The same is true of the first film AW made outside of Thailand, another mysterious drama with elements of fantasy whose plot this time set in Colombia. I haven’t had more luck with “Memory” than the previous “Cemetary of Splendor” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” for which he even won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Continuing both in style and in the poetics of “Memoria” to previous films, the film premiered in an international co-production screened at Cannes where AW won the Jury Prize this time.
It is an extremely slow-paced film composed of long, wide and semi-wide shots shot mostly with a static camera. Everything here is extremely strange, hermetic, mysterious, confusing, but just like his previous films, it was kind of exhausting, exhausting and even boring. The impression was not affected by the fact that AW hired the famous British actress Tilda Swinton for the lead role. She is Jessica, a woman from Scotland who lives in the Colombian city of Medellin and grows and sells flowers, and at the beginning we find her in the capital, Bogota.
There she went to visit a nurse who had ended up in hospital due to some mysterious respiratory problem, and one night Jessica would be awakened by a strange sound. A bizarre sound that only she can hear sounds as if something heavy has fallen to the ground will constantly follow her and that sound will constantly haunt her. It’s a sound that’s hard to describe (just like the whole movie) so Jessica has trouble getting the sound master closer to the sound she heard and the sound she’s looking for. Of course, when he returned to the same studio later, that sound engineer would not be there and no one had heard of him. It is difficult to describe and understand what AW wanted to convey with this film, and it is one of those super-artistic films that is by no means for a wide audience. AW did not manage to impress me this time either and I simply do not like his style, although it is unquestionable that he is an author who managed to build a recognizable and unique style and that he masters the technique masterfully. But who knows, maybe in the future AW will manage to hit me with a movie. Rating 6/10.
MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: NIGHTMARE ALLEY (2021, USA) Movie review, plot, trailer