Memoria (2022)
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Jessica, a British orchid farmer living in Medillín, Colombia, hears a peculiar sound in the middle of the night, while visiting her ailing sister in Bogotá. At first she mistakes the sound for construction, but she quickly starts hearing it again in different places, while others don’t seem to notice at all. After Jessica stops sleeping, she embarks on a journey to find out what that sound is, why it affected her and why she longs to hear it again.
Memoria is first and foremost a metaphysical meditation on memory, time and sounds of life.
The movie has a very minimal score, rather opting for a rich soundscape. Every sound, including Jessica’s mystery sound, has its own character and is given space to breath. So, the depressing silence of a hospital room is interrupted by the cracking of the old chair that Jessica’s been sitting in for hours at her sister’s bedside. The rain splatters on concrete with a metallic, industrial quality, while it feels lush and comforting out in the rainforest, the rain seeming to be more at home there than anywhere else. Everything, from human chatter in a restaurant to intimate moments is emphasized and breathes life into every scene.
Jessica herself, lost and uncomfortable in an urban environment, seems to be a magnet for any sound of life, no matter how small and only through her eyes, do we see how they are woven into the very being of the movie - memory and time itself. After she manages to reproduce the sound in a sound studio with the help of a young sound engineer named Hernán, who then interprets the sound in a beautiful song, no one ever gets to hear, but Jessica, he disappears and seems to not have existed at all, except in our and her memories. The sound further drives her to explore her sleeplessness, as her perception of space and time warps, as she soon discovers other discrepancies, like thinking someone dead and gone, who is actually alive and well.
Eventually she turns to a doctor for sleeping pills, but the doctor refuses to give her the Xanax, as she could get addicted and because it dulls the senses and makes you blind to the beauty and sadness of the world; which are indeed quite visible to us in this movie. Time continues to scrunch together, until we’re not sure, what is past, present or future, Jessica becoming a being out of time, experiencing everything and nothing in long stretches of silence.
At the end of her journey, she comes across a fisherman who claims to remember everything. He is attuned to the universe and its memories, as Jessica seems to be as well. He doesn’t dream and while he sleeps, he dies and is resurrected, when he wakes. He invites her into his home and Jessica starts to “remember”, too, finally learning the origin of the sound.
The world quiets down, she is at the end of her journey, while we’re just beginning to fathom the failing linearity of time and the mysteries of the universe.