![]() ![]() Soldiers guard the road into the mountains a chance encounter with an archaeologist reveals a trove of bones still carrying the wounds of six thousand years prior car alarms ring shrilly, agitated by an obscure stimulus. And how odd: no one else can hear the sound, though in her encounters at the university where she’s researching bacteria and fungus, and at the hospital where she’s visiting a patient in and out of consciousness, there are other traces of things below the surface. It‘s like an explosion, not so different from the backfiring bus that sends a pedestrian diving to the ground in the middle of a crosswalk, but not quite. The film opens with Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British woman in South America, possibly grieving and possibly starting an orchid farm, awoken in the night by a sound. Like the best of his work, Memoria lulls you into its rhythms, gives you the sparse outlines of an intellectual framework, then hits you with the full weight of accumulated lyricism that must be pure cinema. The idea of being attuned to the vibrations of the past, of other times and other lives, becomes literal in Memoria, the director’s first feature film made outside of his native Thailand, in this case in Colombia, a country with its own embedded history of violence and lush jungle biome. In films like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendour, room tone and the rustle of the natural world seem to hum with the aftereffects of war, migration and other trauma – the border between present and past is porous, if you let yourself settle into the becalmed tone and sleepy mood of his scenes, and tune into the vibrations. ![]() Tilda Swinton is extraordinary in a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul which comprises of “pure vibes”.Īpichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are about the calm after the storm. ![]()
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