Memoria tells the double dream of life – Francesco Boille

“What was death like?” “Bella” is the response of a psychic who has just awakened. Memory, the new film by the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul here in Colombia and led with an intense and delicate presence by a Tilda Swinton in a state of grace, is one of the most mysterious and at the same time (apparently) simple, realistic but imaginative, subdued and at the same time films. vital in recent decades. And it is anything but a funereal or disturbing film, even though it goes through anxiety with great tranquility and naturalness: this is just one of the film’s exploits. Death is a dream, perhaps the dream of life itself.

Already awarded by the Jury at Cannes 2021, now designated Film of the Critics, the film by a true artist comes out in theaters, out of any commercial or authorial format that requires the viewer just a little patience, obtaining the key in exchange. entering a sort of fascinating labyrinth of sensations that can never be separated from surprising reflections. The entry into an “other” dimension, hidden in the folds of the most prosaic everyday life and of the most common natural beauty.

Very visual, relatively based on a few dialogues, often synthetic if not rarefied, Memory, as we wrote in our breaking latest news from Cannes 2021 – to which we refer so as not to exceed in repetitions -, in reality it has sound as its protagonist. Synonymous a priori with the most abstract in a film, here it takes on a presence, a concreteness, a materiality, like never before.

A woman wakes up in the middle of the night, in her silence, and hears a sound that is difficult to define, but clear at the same time. A bang, but with something dull, a very loud thud, but not a roar. The woman in question will continue to hear him throughout the film unlike the other people he met, even if her perception of reality will otherwise remain the same as everyone’s. Or rather, the phenomenological perception of daily events will remain the same as most of her, but not her perception of the forms of reality and time.

Like a small mountain river whose waters flow calmly, but surrounded by a landscape that reveals other realities, the woman in question walks on the fleeting ridge between rationality and potential slipping into mental illness, if not madness. Her interiority of her and the world – or worlds – will become the same thing and she will patiently, humbly accept this exploration, partly wanted and partly suffered. But in the end, as we have said, accepted as a natural flow of things simply of “other” nature. Nature understood both figuratively and literally.

English botany Jessica Holland flourishes here, it should be said, as a pantheist and animist anthropologist not only of the entire human race, but of the entire cosmic matter. But before she reaches flowering, Jessica will have to go through some tough trials. In this sort of initiation into a new knowledge of the surrounding reality, and therefore to a new self-awareness, Jessica is like a sort of female Virgil who crosses the frontiers of time and reality, often in the most prosaic and minimal everyday life, leading towards a a new form of awareness an ultra-doubled Dante: the triple “itself” – that of the present, that of the more recent past and that of a more archaic past – is also the spectator in its multiplicity.

Meanwhile, this mysterious sound, this bang that makes her jump, haunts her everywhere day and night, in the apartment and outside, on the street and at dinner with her sister and her husband. Multiple splitting of her personality, and with it of the narrative, are a structural constant in the director’s filmography. From the debut film Mysterious object at noon (2000) up to Uncle Boonmee remembering past lives (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010), this son of itinerant doctors in Thai villages has made physical and mental illness endemic in his cinema as an expression of a single phenomenon. As well as the splitting, the almost schizophrenic split of the linear narrative, making him the lesson of David Lynch’s in a very personal way. Lost roads e Mulholland Drivewhere the two halves that made up the (dis) unity of these two works could be read as a reality, albeit alienated and already ambiguous, which, on the level of the psyche of the respective protagonists, slips into a progressive schizophrenia.

For Weerasethakul, influenced as much as much by Far Eastern auteur cinema by the lesson of Antonioni’s cinema – the themes of the alienation of modern man and incommunicability – the Lynchian binary dialectic is also a metaphorical tool for dealing with alienation and of the devastating cultural impoverishment caused by homologating modernization processes, which arouse a disorientation capable of canceling any spatial and temporal reference point (the ending of Zio Boonmee is really significant in this sense). The end of memory. But at the same time these metaphors are themselves multiple and contain an explicitly metaphysical, if not spiritual, dimension.

Here we are in Colombia, in the capital Bogotá, and the Thai filmmaker investigates this reality in a new way, while allowing him the maximum of coherence with his poetics and favorite themes. The filmic form is no longer dual, but an approximate linearity, like the small curves of a stream in nature that runs alongside many small dualities, equivalent to many microfractures of a reality or several realities that begin to speak to each other, to reconstitute themselves or to rebuild themselves. And so the sister that he sees hospitalized and obsessed with the dream of a black dog, what correspondences does she find in or in reality with the walking dog in a park at night? And with Jessica’s same sister that she sees again at the restaurant and almost doesn’t seem to remember anything anymore? And again the countless encounters with the adorable sound technician of the cinema – of the noble beauty of an Inca prince – who successfully helps her to reconstruct the phantom, but for her very concrete persecutory sound, technical that disappears into thin air and that no one seems to have ever known? Other lives or other realities? Perhaps they are the same thing and the incredible and phantasmagoric ending will be the gloss.

Bogotá is a strange metropolis in the geographical context of South America and Central America: it is a tropical city, but at the same time it is also immersed in the cold of the clouds being located on the Andes mountain range, and not far from reaching an altitude of three thousand meters. Crossing opposites and cohabiting with them: after all Jessica is an English scholar living in Colombia in Medellín, but visiting her sister in Bogotá.

Between light and shadow, between the sun and the storm always lurking, in this perennial humidity everything is under the sign of ambiguity, duality and reversibility in the sense that humanity and all matter are one thing. single, unitary. Life like death, dream like memory. Following a casual or predestined motion, Jessica / Swinton, with her face and gaze alien to great humanity, visits an exhibition of beautiful and strange works, where photography and painting, the abstract and the concrete merge.

Pantheistic and animistic film, Memory is clearly interclass within all possible temporalities and realities, as evidenced by the psychic or shaman who lives on almost nothing met by Jessica at the edge of a quiet stream on which, once again, that terrible noise is superimposed along the edges, both ancestral and coming from (our) unconscious world. But free of the initial anxiety. “You are reading my memory”, he says to her adding: “I am a hard disk and you are an antenna”. Because the first and true magic is empathy, another founding theme of the film. Permanent empathy like memory.