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Perhaps all the discussions about the future of cinema that strategists have so busy start and end in a necessary way in a movie in a movie theater. Perhaps this effort to commercialize the meaning of an artistic form or to confine it to the ridiculous space of personal experiences sold in
weekend
packs
is just one more example of that so lacerating of reducing all debates to the realm of taste or worse, entertainment.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul arrived in Cannes on Thursday to insist on that hypnotic monologue
that has occupied him since even before he presented
'Tropical Malady'
in 2004
,
his first masterpiece. And he did it to, once again, turn the screen into a porous terrain where the viewer's gaze is confused with the fear that life, as
Martín Garzo
says
, will stop telling us things. And for that reason, that religion without doctrine that is art and
that temple without a church that is cinema.
'
Memoria
' is a film that returns to each of the intuitions that move the Thai creator. Weerasethakul's cinema is born in that instant that precedes certainty and that, lived with intensity, ends any certainty. It is a way of understanding cinema as a realistic art whose function, among others, is to discuss reality itself. Suddenly, memory is confused with the image that the given, the established offers of the present; the fantastic acquires the texture of the everyday, and
death is guessed as nothing more than the inheritance left by the living before even being born.
It is cinema thought from the opposite pole of everything that configures the habitual, the regulated, the measured. It is slow cinema that makes slowness the necessary rhythm in which life contemplates itself. It is cinema that ends the debate on the future of cinema because it reveals that cinema is an art of the past built from the future.
It is modern because it is imperishable, because it is mythical.
The story is told of a woman (Tilda Swinton) in Colombia in the company of a couple formed by another woman suffering from a strange evil (perhaps a curse due to the show in which she works on a tribe that does not want to be discovered, the men invisible), and of a poet. For the first time, the Thai leaves his country for a strange territory with the idea perhaps of trying out those same mechanisms that are hidden in the shadows and that give meaning to the light itself that work so well in his filmography. In all of the director's films,
the tumultuous history of political violence ends up seeping through the cracks of those static, solemn and perfect shots.
The character of Tilda Swinton is engaged in the sale of orchids. One fine day she hears a sound that she describes as "a concrete ball hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater ... like a roar that comes from the center of the earth" and that only she is able to hear. The scene in the restaurant in which he becomes aware of his loneliness before the mystery dazzles with the same clarity with which it terrifies. He goes to a sound engineer hoping to find the syntax and even semantics of that noise, of that echo.
Meanwhile, the remains of an old civilization come to light with their enigmas in the form of holes in the skulls through which evil spirits escape.
The woman will end up going to the middle of the jungle where a man who forgets nothing and who, like Funes the Memories, prefers not to travel to avoid filling his mind even more with the confusion of memories. The man will tell you while cleaning a fish a tragic story of a twice humiliated man who, believe it or not, he extracts from a rock to which he patiently listens. He tells that and also tells a terrifying children's story that is nothing more than a memory of Swinton's character.
She cries and from the jungle emerges a science-fiction mystery as surprising as it is miraculous,
which places the film in a mythological place because it is futuristic, millennial because it is completely new.
The director of
'Uncle Boonmee remembers his past lives'
and '
Cemetery of Splendor
' thus configures the sleepwalking geography of a cinema placed on the edge of itself; a cinema that invites you to enter a room you have never visited before. It is not a mesmeric experience (whatever you want this to mean) or even just hypnotic, rather it is a completely lucid sustained sensation to witness the place where
memory is confused with promises, time thickens in the gaze, loneliness becomes a shared act and wakefulness follows the same rules as sleep.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, guided by the eyelidless retinas of Tilda Swinton, dreams of reality from the dream world of simple desire.
It is cinema that fascinates as everything that is experienced for the first time fascinates.
And forever.
Benjamin Biolay, Bruno Dumont, Emanuele Arioli and Blanche Gardin at the presentation of 'France'.IAN LANGSDONEFE
THE MYTH OF FRANCE
For the rest, the official section was completed with the new work by
Bruno Dumont,
which goes by the name of '
France
' (France), and '
Haut et fort'
(High and strong), by
Nabil Ayouch
. Of the first, his vocation of satire and scathing criticism draws attention from a space so naive that it would be said to be absurd. The most prominent of the second is the will and effort to turn the cliché of cinema with a model teacher in the background into eminently political cinema.
Dumont has long been entertaining genres flipping, provoking and opening debates in the middle of the screen. Now, along the same lines and with an imperial and recurring Léa Seydoux (it is the third film in competition in which she makes an appearance), the idea is to analyze the scope of all lies in an eminently false world. Thus, by the hand of a television presenter who is also an obvious metaphor for the French Republic and the entire world, the media are subjected to an operation of reduction to absurdity that is
more disconcerting than just acute.
Indeed, the strategy of the film is to banish from it any hint of irony or baroque and narcissistic reflection worthy of Aaron Sorkin to narrate in the
simplest and most crude way possible what is nothing more than simple crudeness.
It seduces the point of view as anomalous and exhausts the absolute lack of narrative. Everything runs from one event to another in a river structure that, being part of the very meaning of the meaning of everything, is dangerously close to exhausting.
The problem with Ayouch's film is just the opposite.
'Haut et fort'
tells of the arrival of a wise and committed professor in a neighborhood of Casablanca.
Mind you, he is a hip-hop teacher.
That is,
rap as a form of liberation, response and meaning.
From there, from the
'Seed of Evil
' to
'Rebellion in the Classrooms
', all the classics are summoned in a film as predictable as, let's face it, emotional.
Incidentally, rap is discovered in Arabic.
And so it is, Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
the memory of cinema that is also its only future.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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