A LETTERED SOUL, BOOK 2- MUSINGS ON ART AND CULTURE

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

MEMORIA(2021)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has designed a personal travelogue of images and sensations so transporting that MEMORIA becomes an unusual exercise in going beyond the literal title. It isn't memory alone but rather the journey of feeling displaced as a global traveller, pointing to no particular centre where it all began.

The elegantly propulsive Tilda Swinton masters control over her experiences here, as a mysterious aural element becomes the recurring motif of her insomnia-fuelled realisation. She is an English woman living in Colombia and the mystery of that sound she seems to hear traces her multiple interactions with the people around her, some related to her and others she stumbles along the stretch of her journey. The director's tact lies in how well he crafts her solitary moments as well as those definitive interactions, making them humble exchanges where Jessica isn't another protagonist in a motion picture. In essence, she is a wanderer, explorer of the mysteries of life. Her relationship with these people, even if they last just few minutes, root her firmly as an absorber of what they have to say and share. The 'sound' and its source then get offset without occupying an uneven part of this scenario.

She meets her sister(Agnes Brekke) in a restaurant and the latter relates the anecdote of a tribe in the Amazon rainforest known to cast a spell on those enroaching on their sacred land, leading to many unexplained disappearances and even deaths. Her own illness from which she has recuperated gets intrinsically linked with her research on the same tribe even though she is not physically at the location as other capitalist corporations and their representatives. Superstition or a concentrated belief in the unknowable is of primary interest in this particular conversation. Weerasethakul scores by not revealing the exact nature of her illness or her professional background, choosing to foreground the folkloric tone, mythic aura around this native tale.

Secondly, her chance meeting with a doctor( Jeanne Balibar) at the hospital where her sister was admitted previously leads her to the world of anthropology where centuries old fossils are exhumed and probed. Her interest in discovering these intricacies leads her further to a site in the hills where excavation work within a tunnel grips her attention. History and culture hence get coalesced. The past, in the form of myths and legends, subsume the mysteries of a skull in a researchers' laboratory as well as her exchange with her sister. These two especially aid in foregrounding Jessica as charting an anthropological journey of her own, given she's not a native of the place she's in and that the instances heighten the enigma of her own exposure to a 'boom' and shrinking auditory effect she is exposed to recurringly. It never, however, becomes an obsession as the present situation occupies her. Again, the lack of a personal background to Jessica becomes intriguing. The timeline here is the immediate present. Ditto that one stirring interaction with a doctor ( Constanza Gutierrez) who references Salvador Dali while delving into the possible causes of Jessica's disorientation and insomnia.

There is empathy, a natural rhythm and tender concern to the dialogues in this screenplay, extending to Jessica's meeting with the young sound engineer Hernan(Juan Pablo Urrego) who exposes her to multiple variations of the possible 'sound' she's been rattled by. This scene is a clear standout in the way it is structured, with trickles of tension and discovery for our protagonist.

The world of sounds and sights dominates this narrative but never in the conventional dramatic capacity. Note the use of poetry in two scenes and how music enlivens the proceedings in two other instances. Its realism is in how beautifully those cadences are captured with the use of natural sound and cinematography. That way, the psychological mysticism of the final half captures our attention like none other. Trauma of a local and an universal nature unfold in the words said and more so felt there.