Movie Review "Memoria" at CIFF

The 21st century’s cinematic view of the Melting Clocks (The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali)

The movie title that I saw at the CIFF is Memoria that was made in 2021. The director is Apichatpong Weerasethakul who is from Thailand, and the movie filmed in Colombia. Not only Thailand and Colombia participated in this movie but France, Germany, Mexico, China too. The film stars Tilda Swinton (Scotland), Elkin Diaz (Colombia), Jeanne Balibar (France), Juan Pablo Urrego (Colombia), and Daniel Gimenez Cacho (Mexico). Memoria was produced by Kick the Machine (Thailand), Burning Blue (Colombia), Anna Sanders Films (France), The Match Factory, Piano (Mexico), Xstream Pictures (China), and iQIYI (China). This movie overturns the concept of sense (of time and space) that people are aware of surroundings, and makes the audiences experience how the memories from thousands of years ago or the memories of others can be delivered to others through surrealistic techniques. 

    Jessica (Tilda Swinton) visits Bogota, Colombia where her sister is living with her Colombian husband and she started listening to loud, metallic bang sound from her room. She visits young sound engineer Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) to make the same sound that she has heard. She also meets Agnes (Jeanne Balibar) who is studying human bones from 3,000 years ago. Later, she encounters old Hernan (Elkin Diaz) in the woods near the construction site where the human bones were found. Then, they start a conversation and share their memories with each other. Each event isn’t connected and so audiences can’t see the narrative as a whole.  

    There is interesting camerawork and no background music in this movie. Shooting techniques are very simple compared to complex ideas. Most of the scenes were filmed with fixed long shots so the main character always exists with the surrounding landscape and people. It makes the audience focus on the overall atmosphere and not on the characters’ emotions. It feels like each scene is a fixed artwork and realistic with no background music. For this reason, when something strange happens in the movie, it looks even more strange.

Memoria is a special movie because it will expand people’s thinking. It can linger in your mind so much that it’s burdensome. However, it will change the concept of space, time, and sound that we had in our daily life. Even though there are lots of metaphors that people can’t understand immediately, it can lead people to the joy of interpretation that lasts longer than the movie’s actual running time. In fact, I could see many young people discussing the movie after it was over at the theater. Also, people can learn that movies have more diverse functions than just entertainment. Memoria is different from Hollywood movies that audiences only passively enjoy. By destroying the narrative but making each scene independently, it allows the audience to connect the divided events and find the meanings actively.