Postcard from Cannes #10 : Make some Noise!
It’s pretty much a given that during the Cannes film festival journalists don’t get much sleep, between screenings all day and night not to mention press conferences and interviews. Memoria, by Cannes Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers escape from the crowds and the noise.
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Memoria is the seventh feature by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Running in the main competition, it takes place in a universe where time stands still and silence is hypnotic, perhaps a little too much so.
Lead actress Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, an English woman who lives and works in Colombia, and although it is described as an English-speaking film, she mostly speaks Spanish.
At the start of the film, she hears a strange and frightening noise - a kind of heavy metallic boom. At first she thinks it is construction works, but then she hears it elsewhere, in the street and in a restaurant. She discovers to her horror she is the only one that can hear it.
The sound of a door closing
The main sound I heard throughout the film was not in the soundtrack: it was the slamming of the cinema doors as people left in the middle of the press screening, a phenomenon I had not really experienced until now.
I stayed, partly out of respect but also because I was weary and the long scenes with no sound or dialogue gave me a chance to rest my eyes.
Jessica meets a handsome sound engineer who helps reconstruct the sound digitally, as if searching for its origins (which turn out to have a sci-fi twist). Is it some spiritual message from people who died and whose bones are being dug up in excavation sites across the country?
In what I took to be a moment of humour, he explains that he plays in a electro-punk band called The Depth of Delusion, which to my mind would’ve been a better title for this film.
The earth moved
The story begins to make some more sense when Jessica goes to a village in the mountains and meets a man who literally remembers everything he’s seen or heard, including “the sound.” Much silence (and snoozing on and off screen) accompanies these scenes.
For some, this is pure Weerasethakul, who does not deviate from his trademark ingredients despite the fact that it was his first film outside Thailand with a non-Thai cast.
The winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives doesn’t shy away from the showing the silence, the waiting, the listening, the rain falling, but as a first timer, I was bewildered and frustrated when I wasn’t nodding off.
It will most likely divide audiences (and the jury perhaps) down the middle.
The Guardian called it “a beautiful and mysterious movie, slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat.”
I will admit I went to the see the film mainly to see Swinton, an enigmatic and expressive actress who brings a special aura to each film. She also appears in at least two other projects being shown at Cannes this year (The French Dispatch, The Souvenir part II) for which her roles are radically different.
Is this a joke?
“You could easily imagine other viewers seeing bits of it and believing it's something that was made for easy laughs on Saturday Night Live,” American media Deadline wrote after the premiere on Thursday.It did not hesitate to label the film as made for a niche, intellectual audience, specialists of this genre. I would tend to agree.
I came back out into the sunshine, heat and noise and immediately welcomed my “return to the real world”. What a contrast it was to the brilliant rousing musical fireworks of the previous evening in honour of the French national holiday.
The beachfront and the evening sky provided the screen and the soundtrack was all cinema music. It was full of noise and colour and creativity, and lots of loud “booms”, thankfully none of them heard with foreboding.
No offense but I think I know in which world I belong.
Cannes put on a major fireworks show for 14th July national holiday. Only one word: WOW! #Cannes2021 pic.twitter.com/bMzRkHOFcK
— Ollia Horton (@rougeparasol) July 15, 2021
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