by Christine Westwood
Tilda Swinton is the executive producer of Memoria and plays the lead character of Jessica, an expat Englishwoman living in Colombia who is lured by a mysterious sound to explore past, present and beyond.
For a Q&A with the ICA art collective, Swinton, who spent 15 years nurturing the film to release, states that “Memoria is a piece of work of which I am deeply proud. To present it at the ICA, a lighthouse to so many of us as a beacon of fresh perspectives and spirit through so many thicks and thins, is something to which I am looking forward with real pleasure.”
The film is written and directed by Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He and Swinton have a long connection, pen pals since 2004 and co-creating Archipelago Cinema, a film festival off the coast of Thailand, in 2012.
Swinton’s angular frame, androgyny, a gaze that seems to reflect the viewer back at themselves, plus a rarified ‘Woman who fell to earth’ beauty, means she can play just about anything. Her acting career began in the late 1980s with roles in TV, shorts and on the big screen, but it was Sally Potter’s flawless casting of Swinton as the gender and time fluid ‘Orlando’ in the 1992 film of the same name that established her unique talent in the world arena.
Now 61, she has gained 169 award nominations and 72 wins including the Oscar for best supporting actress as a high-flying corporate lawyer in the thriller Michael Clayton (2007). Other roles include the repressed middle-class Emma Recchi ignited by passion in Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love (2009) and the broken, bewildered mother of a psychopath in We Need to Talk about Kevin.
Her startling looks and ability to channel a villain made her a shoo-in as the White Witch in the Narnia franchise, and she has acted other fantasy characters in Doctor Strange and Snowpiercer.
In an interview with The Guardian’s Simon Hatterstone in January this year, Swinton opened up about considering a career change as a palliative care nurse. It’s not the unlikely stretch it seems. In her 20s and 30s when she was immersed in London’s queer culture with Derek Jarman’s creative set, she attended scores of deathbeds during the AIDS epidemic. It seems that her unflinching exploration into the extremes of human experience extends way beyond her acting roles.
Swinton’s formative years with those multi creative artistic groups makes her collaboration with the experimental, creative vision of Thai writer and director Weerasethakul a natural fit. A retrospective of his non-feature-film work, ‘The Serenity of Madness’ (Art Institute of Chicago, 2017) included videos and stills, photographs and ephemera, reflecting his multimedia perspective.
Growing up in Thailand, Weerasethakul was culturally Buddhist. But cinema was what brought him to embrace the religion in a spiritual way. He told The New Yorker’s Hilton Als, “Buddhism became a meditative way of observing my mind, my body, and time, time and memory… I feel that meditation and cinema have a big connection. When you observe time, you observe your body; you can feel these metaphysical layers.”
“At fifty-one, he is contemporary cinema’s preeminent poet of place and of dislocation,” adds Als. “He draws on Buddhist tradition and Thai folklore to create stories that—like life—often change direction, stop abruptly, or become something else altogether.”
From his 2000 black and white documentary, Mysterious Object at Noon he plays with reflective long shots to reference time and space, bends the cinematic form and explores the edges of perception and themes of interconnectedness.
He has had a great showing at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2004 he won the Jury Prize at Cannes for Tropical Malady, described as a romance between a soldier and a country boy, wrapped around a Thai folk-tale involving a shaman with shape-shifting abilities.
He went on to win the Palme d’Or with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives in 2010, (2010), and Memoria, his ninth feature, also collected the Jury prize in 2021 and continues the other-worldly themes.
Cinemagoers are so used to fast paced action, it is arresting to sit with Memoria’s long opening sequence, a single frame sustained to a point of tension that has the viewer startled out of their seat when the suspense breaks. Swinton as Jessica is framed, waiting for that moment, in a recurring pose of back facing to camera where the audience is invited to experience the scene around and beyond her.
This opening scene also includes a setting with a recurring motif, a curtain, suggestive of borders between worlds, dream, imagination, life and death.
Sound is the other character in the film, utilised more profoundly than in most films you’ll ever see. From the symphony of car alarms, mysteriously begun and ended, to the spaciously quiet natural sounds of nature, and an impromptu jazz concert where the camera is trained on the audience, including Jessica, rather than the performers, opening up yet more spatial perception for the viewer.
One engrossing, extended scene is Jessica’s visit to a musicologist where they examine and dissect the form and nature of just one sound, a pivotal focus point in the film.
Set in Colombia in the city of Medellin and the countryside around Bogota, the location becomes yet another character with its own moods, weather, spaces and colours.
Time and again, Weerasethakul disrupts the viewing window, including long panning shots of people moving in and out of the frame, where the main character may walk out of the picture, leaving us unattached to an avatar, experiencing the scene directly. Likewise, he uses mainly mid and long shots so the sense of intimacy with a character is diffused.
Themes of anthropology stretch the narrative back and forth and time as well as space. This breaking barriers of form and narrative offer the notion of humans not as discrete beings but connected into a network of life, where memory and emotion may be imprinted alike on mind or rock or sound waves.
In an interview with Time Out Bangkok, Swinton speculates, “it’s a sort of shared mystery for Jessica, for the film, and for the audience. It may not be necessarily entertaining, but maybe being engaged is being entertained.”
It’s a match made in creative heaven for the director and actress. Weerasethakul spoke to Variety’s James Wright about his leading actress’s passion for collaboration.
“She considers herself one of the workers in the film who shares responsibilities. She is there not only for the narrative but for the synchrony of everything that contributes to what’s in the frame. So in a sense, she’s a filmmaker as I am and as others are.”
For the same article, Swinton explained, “what I love most about it, and the most important element, is the ongoing conversation. The films themselves are leaves that fall off the tree — but the tree is the conversation.”
Memoria is in cinemas April 7, 2022