QCinema 2021 | Memoria

 

(the following review is an extended version of a review originally posted on Letterboxd.)

When I was in first or second grade, I got a hold of a tape recorder. Initially intended for use by my father for work purposes, he quickly forgot about it. My cousins and I used that recorder to make jokes and mess around, but looking back almost 30 years later, it now stands as an indelible record of that time. One of the things we did with that recorder was interview random people in the large ancestral home we spent our summers in. Most of the people we talked to in these tapes are already dead, and listening to their voices many years later feels disconnected from my own recollections of those people. Memory is plastic, molded and shaped by our own subjectivity, then slowly eroded through time.

In Memoria, the search for meaning behind strange noises in the night becomes a personal, metaphysical excavation of one's self, then transforms once again into an exploration of how memory, when shared, leads to completely different experiences, and lets us tap into something larger than ourselves: a sort of collective memory, blood, sweat and tears seeping into the earth.

Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is awakened by a mysterious sound. We are not told what the sound is, and it seems only she can hear it. It is an experience that seems exclusively hers. Her distress becomes curiosity, as she tries to recreate the sound - by recreating it, perhaps she can also share it. She tries to communicate this feeling, this experience, first with a sound engineer named Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) and she succeeds, although even then there is something slightly off. Nevertheless, a connection has been made between the two of them.

There was a time in college when I underwent a particularly traumatic experience. I was being harshly scolded one way or another, by myself or a group of us, directly or indirectly, by someone else - maybe a single person or a group of people. I do not remember the details, nor the words they spoke to me. But until now, I remember the cadence of their harsh words, and what I felt in response to it.

Sound can both be a vessel for memory and mode of transmission. When a memory, like sound, is shared or experienced, it passes through the recipient, resonating with their own life experiences, creating something different every time. The director and cast have mentioned how this is a film about trauma, and I get it. Those who have been traumatized are reliving a painful memory, and when they relate that to someone else, those people may empathize with that pain, but they may never perfectly understand it. However, what I just said is only Joe and Tilda's interpretation of the film, in other words, that's only how the film resonates with their own experiences.  

In that collective shared memory, whether preserved through sound, music, or the bone fragments of people long dead, we gain perspective, a sense of reality, and even empathy. We are not told of Jessica's pain, if she even has something like that. We are not told of her past experiences, or if her sister is involved with the creation of that sound, or if she is escaping or reliving her own trauma instead of someone else's. But still, we try to understand. The memory itself may not be as important as what it invokes in us. 

In a different, maybe broader sense, it says something about cinema itself - cinema as an externalization of memory resonates with our own life experiences, making us remember trauma, or grief, or profound happiness and contentment. In fact, look at any aggregation of discourse on the film and see how varied the responses are to the film - awe or indifference, depending on who you ask, all of them grasping for some truth or meaning that may only feel true and meaningful to them. But if memory (or cinema, for that matter, like in this case) does make a connection, somehow - then strange and wonderful things can happen.