Memoria

This dream-like film stars Tilda Swinton as a woman who becomes obsessed with the mystery of a strange sound only she can hear. Hauntingly beautiful at times but also deadeningly dull.

I can’t ever recall a movie’s own screener notes describing it as “bewildering,” as they do for “Memoria.”

Usually for films that eschew a traditional narrative they’ll use more oblique language, like it’s about “being and observing,” or my personal favorite, “pure cinema.” That particular phrase seems especially reserved for movies where the director just fell in love with their own shots and gave up on any notion of assembling them together into anything approaching coherence.

Turns out, “Memoria” is actually not all that bewildering. Rather, it’s about a woman who is bewildered.

Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish woman living in Colombia who is surprised one night by a strange thudding sound with seemingly no source. She hears it again later, and becomes obsessed with tracking down its origin/meaning. No one seems to hear it but her.

It’s written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai filmmaker who won the top prize at Cannes a couple of decades ago, though I’ll admit he hasn’t made any movies I’ve seen, or even heard of.

It’s a very slow-moving affair at two hours, 16 minutes, shot and edited in a style benevolently described as languid. Two characters will share a space but not speak for minutes at a time. Or the camera will pan away from the people to look at the natural setting around them, and then we’ll just sit and look at that for a good, long while.

Not a lot “happens,” other than Jessica meeting various people to talk about her strange sound. This includes going to a young sound engineer, Herman (Juan Pablo Urrego), who helps put together an approximation of her sound through trial and error… though she’s confused when she later returns to the studio and is told no such person works there.

Other odd encounters like this happen. She meets with her sister, Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), and brother-in-law, Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who insist the colleague she thought was dead is indeed very much alive. Jessica also visits an ongoing archeological dig, with the unsettling note that some of the children’s skulls show signs of being drilled into while they were alive, presumably to relieve ill humors or whatnot.

Later, Jessica will explore the surrounding jungle and come across a man about her own age, also named Hernan (Elkin Díaz), who claims to have total recall of everything that’s ever happened to him, so he has chosen never to leave his tiny village because “experiences are harmful.” He just sits by the river catching and scaling fish, and it seems enough for him.

Is this the same Hernan, but decades into the future? Is Jessica a real person or just a wandering spirit? Is the mysterious thud she heard actually revealing of something significant, or is it just a symptom of mental illness?

An answer is eventually given, of sorts, though certainly much is still left to interpretation. For my part, I wish they hadn’t bothered and just left it a confounding puzzle.

The movie, at least the parts where actors are present, is photographed entirely in medium shots, so we feel like we’re sitting 10 to 20 feet away from them. It seems an odd choice, given what a wonderfully expressive actress Swinton is, so I felt cheated having her kept so far away and affectless in her mien.

My guess is Weerasethakul intentionally pursued this sense of remoteness, so the audience would continually feel out of sorts and off-balance, unable to make sense of these odd noises and clues just as Jessica is.

What this really results in is a movie that is often hauntingly beautiful but also deadeningly dull for stretches. It’s very much trying not to be a traditional movie-going experience, where we have emotional highs and lows or gasp at something amazing that happens. Not every film needs to be that. But it’s unclear what this one is trying to be.

As time has gone on, I’ve found myself more willing to embrace non-narrative filmmaking like “A Ghost Story.” I do find that movies like it and “Memoria” are best seen in a darkened cinema, where you can be enveloped by the experience and free from distraction.

That was not my environement, and it may have sapped my encounter with the film.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that you can have films that are dream-like and experimental and play around with the conventions of storytelling — but still tell a story.

I will confess that when I sit down with a new movie, the joyous call to arms that springs forth from my mind is “tell me story.” Not, “show me something about being and observing,” and ho-lee God not “please let me experience pure cinema.”

Pure cinema is like pure alcohol: it may be appreciated by those who created it as an exercise in crafting. But it’s not really intended for consumption.