Memoria - Tilda Swinton is hearing things

I saw this trailer yesterday and thought it looked (and sounded) excellent. So I’m sharing it with you right now!

Cool poster too.

Memoria has the best use of sound I’ve ever heard in a film.

I admire the director Apichatpong (aka Joe) so much. In Thailand, he’s an outspoken critic of the monarchy and his films have encountered pretty severe censorship, in one case due to the inclusion of LGBT characters. He had quite a powerful solution to the mandatory cuts that were imposed on him in his home country: he would drop the scenes (if he didn’t, the film wouldn’t receive distribution), but rather than just assembling a new workprint that fully erased those moments, he insisted on replacing them with a black screen for the cut’s duration so audiences would know that his film was tampered with.

Now that’s how you do a trailer. Grab me without giving away half the plot (or in this case, without giving away anything).

I saw this a couple of weeks ago here in Seattle. Absolutely wonderful film, although you kinda have to be on board with what Joe does…really slow, meditative visual poetry with intentionally obtuse narratives. The release strategy with Memoria is pretty odd, too - apparently it will never see a home video release. Instead it will show in one city at a time as a kind of traveling art exhibit for an indeterminate amount of time. So see it when you get a chance, I guess.

That’s, for some reason, a US-only release straregy though. It’s streaming in other territories through MUBI, so it’s widely available digitally on torrent sites, streaming sites, etc. That’s how I saw it, since it wouldn’t be back in the Bay Area until late this year.

It’s worth seeing, especially if you appreciate Joe’s “slow cinema” approach, but I’m not jumping through those hoops just to see it.