Memoria

Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.

Memoria is a sensory experience, but it takes a performer like Swinton to amplify Joe’s technique.

To be as suggestive, yet covert as possible, the great innovation of this film is the notion of how sounds can be memories—all too often in the popular imagination, we think of them as mini-movies of the mind, or visual spots of time as in The Tree of Life or the Romantic poet Wordsworth’s concept.

A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot—as well as to their own posture and breathing.

Weerasethakul’s Memoria doesn’t give too many answers. It moves at an interminable pace. But those are mostly strengths rather than faults, methods that force the audience to engage with the thoughts and collective memory buried deep within their psyches. In that sense, Memoria is a sensory explosion, and its dense, immersive shrapnel isn’t easily removable.

Memoria is gloriously weird and it has that most magical quality of making you look at things in a totally different way.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

A Resonant Void of Sound and Memory: An Auditory Descent into the Unknown250215 (3.7)This round, dark vibration tearing through my head—is it a loneliness that oscillates upon meeting everything beautiful? This was my first time experiencing a film quite like this, and I found it deeply compelling. The unique sensation of countless voices intersecting within my mind while simply listening was a fresh experience. It felt as though my various senses were falling out of sync; the constant clash of judgments and assumptions left me feeling slightly seasick. Jessica is a woman whose life is repeatedly interrupted by a specific sound—the thud of a concrete ball dropping into a metal well filled with seawater. As she navigates Bogota, visiting her sister in the hospital and interacting with Professor Juan, she begins to feel she is losing her mind. She seeks out Hernán, an audio engineer, to recreate the sound, only to find later that no one at the studio knows who he **** film’s physical motifs—excavations, explorations, tunnels, and ancient skulls—effectively mirror the physical process of chasing memories read through sound. This thematic structure reaches its peak when Jessica encounters a different Hernán in the jungle, a man who claims to remember everything and thus limits what he sees, believing that experience is harmful because it causes "violent confusion" within memory. The scene where he sleeps as still as a mannequin is eerie, contrasting yet overlapping with the silence before Jessica wakes. The climax, where Jessica’s face blooms into a beautiful smile of relief and recognition, occurs amidst a cosmic "thud" or "bang"—the warp sound of a spacecraft brushing against the Paleozoic era. This movie is less a traditional narrative and more a two-hour immersive exhibition themed around memory and acoustics. There is a strange, grounded realism in the way it refuses to explain or show, forcing the viewer to sketch out new information and memories purely through sound. Touching the "lightning rod" of the past and experiencing the echoes of every era was a cathartic, sensory revelation.

It **** **** **** its grasp never attains fulfillment, leaving viewers feel as though they're been toyed with for more than two hours for a payoff that's only modestly satisfying at best. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest has its moments of visual and audio appeal, but its protracted, heavily padded, thin and meandering narrative and half-baked character development is a frustrating follow for even the most patient of viewers. Its exceedingly tiresome still shots (of which there are many) alone push audiences to plead for getting on with it already. Those well-versed in the paranormal and metaphysical will find this an especially tedious watch, given that what the filmmaker is going for is apparent quite early on, yet the picture leaves its spectators haplessly bound to sit through the flotsam that leads to a conclusion with few surprises and little satisfaction. "Memoria" has somehow found a fan base among the art house crowd, but, to be blunt, lofty pretention does not translate to profound insight, and that's an overinflated balloon desperately in need if being popped. And none of this takes into account the peculiar distribution plan that has accompanied this picture's release, one that has made it extremely difficult to screen this one in the first place (though, given the result, maybe that's a good thing). Indeed, how this one managed to walk away with awards like the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize and the Chicago Film Festival's Gold Hugo for Best Feature is truly beyond me.

Went to see Memoria because of its raving reviews from critics but really couldn't get how in the world did it get such high score here. Amazing acting from Tilda but the whole movie is extremely slow, boring and pretentious, no idea what director is trying to convey here. Maybe it's too artsy for us to understand.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]