Johnny Depp in 'Jeanne du Barry' to Open 2023 Cannes Film FestivalĪpichatpong Weerasethakul Wants to Teach Filmmakers How Not to Make a MovieĢ023 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Talk SeriesĤ5 Great Films That Failed at the Box Officeįilmed in the mountains of the municipality of Pijao and Bogotá, “Memoria” features Tilda Swinton “walking a lot, like a ghost,” Weerasethakul told La Tempestad last year.
Weerasethakul has remained comfortably outside of any studio system, making the films he wants to make, from the beautiful and beguiling queer love story “Tropical Malady” to the Cannes Palme d’Or-winning folk tale “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” But distribution from Neon could bring him to a wider audience after the Cannes Film Festival. The drama is centered on a Scottish woman who, after hearing a strange banging sound at daybreak, begins to experience a bizarre sensory syndrome while she’s traveling through the jungles of Colombia. An official trailer has been released in the meantime. The film, which premieres July 15 at Cannes, will be released later this year in the United States by distributor Neon. Memoria functions as a filmic equivalent, contemplating as it does the passage of time, and the artefacts that survive us all.Ever the weaver of mysterious, transcendent dramas that unfold across far-flung landscapes that stir awakenings in his protagonists, Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns with the long-awaited “ Memoria.” This marks the Thai filmmaker’s English-language debut and his first pairing with Tilda Swinton. Mary Queen of Scots, for example, had a watch in the shape of a skull with an engraving reading: ”Pale death knocks with the same tempo upon the huts of the poor and the towers of Kings.” Throughout art history, wealthy patrons have commissioned memento mori, beautiful pieces of art that remind the beholder of their inevitable eventual death. But sound design is not ultimately what the film is about, in its bones: the themes are time, death and and intergenerational memory. The noise itself, which we experience alongside her, but nobody else can hear, is a masterpiece of sound design, a kind of deep metallic whomph best experienced in a good cinema whenever the film is eventually released it would be a bit of a shame, and I think destroy one key scene altogether, to attempt this one on the majority of home set-ups. The plot concerns Tilda Swinton’s British botanist Jessica, visiting her sister in Colombia, who has been hearing a peculiar, inexplicable noise lately and would like to figure out what it is. It’s the kind of cinema that leaves a lot of space for you, the viewer, and whatever it is that you’re bringing to the table, so it’s probably best approached by those in comfortable dialogue with their own thoughts.
I’m not sure who has changed more, me or Weerasethakul (I suspect it’s me), but I connected with Memoria. I have to confess that his work used not to be for me, that I greeted several of his films with a shrug and was outright driven up the wall by Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work is a cinema of patience and profundity, of image-making that seeps into the soul and stays there.
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