Can you think of a poem about mushrooms?
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2022
#9 : Memoria
Tilda Swinton joins forces with Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul for an English-language, Colombia-set fable about a woman who can hear sounds that others don’t appear to.
Well, it's got Tilda Swinton in it - it's going to be weird isn't it? Maybe watchable, maybe not - but probably not dull.
Oh, how wrong I was! To start with, it's very quiet - we're 8 minutes in before we get any dialogue. And from that point on, things just get weirder. Tilda plays Jessica, a Scottish woman who for no obvious reason lives in Colombia and one day she's woken up by a weird "womph" sound which it transpires no-one else can hear. Which puzzles her and so she tries to find out what's going on - and hilarity results!
Well, no it doesn't. Just oddness. And often very dull oddness. For example, we spend 15+ minutes with Jessica and some dude at a mixing desk playing different versions of the "womph" sound, whilst they switch between English and Spanish for no obvious reason. At another point Jessica asks a man to show her how he goes to sleep - so he does. And we spend the next five minutes watching her sit beside him in silence as he sleeps. Wtf?!?
And I'm going to stick to my no spoilers rule, but you're really not going to believe what causes the "womph" noise. Part of me is surprised they actually resolved the "mystery" - it feels like just the sort of film that would take great delight in not telling you, but the resolution is most strange indeed.
Tilda is in peak-Tilda form here - lots of stillness in awkward poses and gazing into the distance. If you like that then there's plenty of that here for you to "enjoy". There aren't really any other actors that make a huge impact on the film but I am going to mention Elkin Diaz as the elder Hernan Bedoya (the fish scaler) and Juan Pablo Urrego as the younger Hernan Bedoya (the sound engineer) if only to mention that they are in no way related and there's absolutely no reason to give them the same name.
It's quite a beautiful film which makes you think there's a load in it to think about - but unfortunately when you think about it, you realise that none of it makes any sense at all. It's very much a fan of holding the shot for longer than anyone would feel is necessary - I found myself thinking "get a move on" very frequently. It's also a very auditory-focused film - impressively so, but very oddly because sometimes the sounds we're hearing are nothing to do with the scene that's playing out in front of us. And it really didn't help that I picked the wrong subtitles to start with but the film is so weird that it took me quite some time to realise.
A lot of this film looked very good - I reckon if you played it at about quadruple speed it would be a lot more bearable. I don't think I can say I hated it because it was often very beautiful to look at, but boy was it a struggle to get through. I mean a massive, massive struggle - both because of its slowness and its utter, utter bizarreness. Part of me wants to recommend it just so you can experience what I did - you'd hate me but you'd also go "ah yes - I see what you mean". If you want to watch it then it's available to stream on BFIPlayer and to rent in the all the usual places. But seriously, I wouldn't...
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