Cannes 2021 With Apichatpong and Tilda
For a while it was said that Tilda Swinton could star in a
biopic
of her great friend
David Bowie
.
She would have been perfect, in the same way that Cate Blanchett was the best Bob Dylan of those proposed by Todd Haynes in
I'm not there
(2007).
The idea didn't catch on, but that's okay, because
Bowie is more than ever
in
Memoria
, the hypnotic new film by the Thai genius who won the Palme d'Or
cannoise
with
Uncle Boonmee remembers his past lives
From him (2010).
Swinton is more Bowie than ever,
in the Martian sense
of Bowie in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
(Nicolas Roeg, 1976), not because he starts singing.
What he does do is visit a sound studio in Bogotá, which is where he starts
Memoria
.
The film thus joins a series of films that, from
Impacto
(Brian De Palma, 1981) to the recent
Tres
(Juanjo Giménez, 2021), acquire full meaning
around a mixer
.
For Swinton, however, it is only the first stop on a journey that will take her to the heart of the Colombian jungle.
The jungle is the favorite habitat of the Thai, who had never shot outside his country, not even with a western star like Swinton.
A magical jungle in which there are always surprises
, strange appearances like the expectant and nocturnal tiger in
Tropical malady
(2004), or the red-eyed creature, which seems to come out of
Star Wars
to appear in
Uncle Boonmee
...
If in Weerasethakul's previous feature,
Cemetery of splendor
(2015),
a group of narcoleptic soldiers
slept an eternal nap in a field hospital, dreamily connected to the legends of a palace buried under their beds,
Memoria
begins with a Tilda Swinton who she almost fell out of bed, shaken by a
huge crash
, which has ripped her out of sleep, shaking her from the depths of her past life.
Obsessed with the mysterious nature of the sound, which sounds like
a huge cement ball
crashing into the metal walls of a water tank, even
5-milligram elephant-grave diazepam
won't catch you back to sleep .
Hence that visit to the studio, where a diligent technician will try to materialize the origin of her sleeplessness, based on some indications given in an approximate Castilian with a rather funny British accent.
For those of us who have followed Weerasethakul since the indecipherable
Mysterious object at noon
(2000), it has also been as if he had been translated for us, as if his poetry, rooted in
an exotic and unknown folklore
, now reached us through the sieve of madrigal realism. magical that even Disney identifies with Colombia.
But he hasn't lost an iota of the charm of it.
On the contrary, it is his most diaphanous and limpid film, perfect to initiate neophytes.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who until a few days ago exhibited his installations, videos and photographs at La Fabra i Coats in Barcelona (under the title
Periphery at night, again between sleep and wakefulness
), and Tilda Swinton, who slept her siesta indoors in a showcase at the Moma in New York (directed by Cornelia Parker, in 2013),
they were doomed to meet
.
only the
white duchess
he could extirpate him from his universe, and push him to shoot on the other side of the world, although always in the tropics, and in the jungle.
This film is the happiest of encounters, a true dream, a sensory journey that, as is often said in these cases, must be enjoyed on the largest of screens and with the best of sounds.
Otherwise it wouldn't be a movie either.
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