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      ‘Memoria’ Review: In Search of Lost Time

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      Tilda Swinton stars in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive and enchanting new film, set in Colombia.In the middle of the night, Jessica hears a noise — loud and slightly metallic, somewhere between a bang and thud. Later, talking with a young sound engineer named Hernán, she will describe it as large ball of concrete slamming into a metal wall surrounded by seawater, a remarkably vivid image that Hernán patiently attempts to synthesize.Jessica, a British expatriate living in Colombia and played by Tilda Swinton, refers to what she heard as “my sound” — “mi sonido” in Spanish — and it seems to exist for her ears alone. Or rather for her and the audience watching “Memoria,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic and enchanting new film.The sound startles Jessica at dinner with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and follows her from Bogotá to a small town in the mountains. The possibility that it’s an auditory hallucination is raised at one point, and there are other moments when the reliability of Jessica’s perception seems to be in question. Is Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) a figment of her imagination? If so, how could he have offered to buy her a refrigerator for the orchids she is raising on her farm in Medellín?Even though Jessica visits a rural doctor, asking for Xanax to help her sleep — the doctor offers Jesus as a safer, more effective treatment — her psychological state isn’t really what “Memoria” is about. Saying exactly what it is about poses a quandary that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.Whenever you think you have a handle on where the story might be going, the ground shifts. Jessica is baffled by the sound and other, vaguely similar phenomena, but she doesn’t seem to be delusional, or even unduly troubled. She is curious, gently questioning people she meets — notably an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) and a second, older Hernán (Elkin Díaz) — about their work and its potential relevance to her situation. The film operates in a similar spirit, following an invisible map toward a surprising destination.Along the way, Weerasethakul pauses to contemplate the remnants of ancient civilizations and the chaos of a modern life, as flickerings of supernaturalism, disrupted chronology, science fiction and the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate Jessica’s journey.The director, most of whose previous films take place in Thailand, has a longstanding interest in the visual, social and metaphysical contrasts between city and countryside. His urban spaces, like the university where the first Hernán works and the hospital where Jessica’s sister is a patient, tend to be sleek and institutional, governed less by commerce or political authority than by science and technology. The Southeast Asian jungles in his “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” — and the lush Andean mountainside where the second Hernán makes his home — are zones of magic, where the modern distinction between myth and fact does not apply.This doesn’t quite make Weerasethakul a magical realist, though the South American setting of “Memoria” might make that description especially tempting. His imagination is philosophical and speculative, and in style he is more a poet than a fabulist, at home in the gaps between our various ways of making sense of the world.His refusal to explain can be a challenge, and “Memoria” demands patience and attention. I found it an emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience, but not one I can easily summarize or classify, partly because the feeling of radical uncertainty — Jessica’s feeling, but also mine — was a little too real. Her gradual unmooring from any stable sense of reality, and her perseverance in spite of that dislocation, strike me as utterly familiar, even as the causes of her alienation remains elusive. I am haunted by the plight of the second Hernán, a man blessed and cursed with a prodigious memory that connects him to a universe of suffering even as it condemns him to a state of isolation.Swinton and Díaz are subtle, charismatic performers, and their scenes together, which make up most of the film’s last section, bring it to a new level of intensity. What passes between Jessica and Hernán, and the sequence of images that follows, represent a quietly mind-blowing moment of cinema, something as wild and argument-provoking now as the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was in 1968.You have to see it to believe it, and to see it you’ll have to go to a movie theater. “Memoria” is opening in New York this week and then making its way across the country, one cinema at a time. It’s worth the wait, and the trip.MemoriaRated PG. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Last and First Men’ Review: Pondering Posterity

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      Tilda Swinton narrates the bleak future of humanity in the only feature directed by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.“Last and First Men” is the only feature directed by the Icelandic film composer Johann Johannsson (“Sicario”), who died suddenly in 2018. According to the producer Thor Sigurjonsson in notes provided for journalists, his death occurred late in the filmmaking process, just before “we were about to start on the final music.”Yet even describing “Last and First Men” as a movie, while accurate, is misleading; it often feels closer to a literary exercise or fine-art photography. (A live, multimedia version was shown in 2017.) It combines a complex, “Dune”-like mythology with the sonorous, hypnotic line readings of the British essay films of Patrick Keiller (“Robinson in Ruins”).Based on the 1930 science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, the film mainly consists of 16-millimeter black-and-white images of abandoned monuments, identified in the credits as being in the Balkans. No humans appear. While the camera surveys the asymmetries of the monolithic sculptures, often pondering the sky through negative space in the stonework, Tilda Swinton delivers a voice-over that begins with an epic poem-style invocation (“listen patiently”) and is framed as a dispatch from two billion years from now, when our descendants, bracing for extinction, share a telepathic hive mind and have appearances that would look grotesque to us.The landscape, with the occasional sight of a bird or a cloud streak from an airplane, pierces the illusion that we’re observing the colonized Neptune that Swinton speaks of. Color — in the green of an oscilloscope or in the fiery hues of the sun — intermittently punctures the monochrome. And Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project is always striking to the eye even in moments when the narrative lulls.Last and First MenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      A Filmmaking Life Gets a Sequel

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      Joanna Hogg is the rare director to be given the greenlight for a two-part drama about finding her own voice. She’s only been thinking about it since 1988.Sequels and spinoffs and origin stories fill the multiplexes, but it’s vanishingly rare to see two feature-length dramas centered on the same, real-world character. Enter “The Souvenir,” two films directed by Joanna Hogg on a subject that’s also not common onscreen: a young woman finding her way in life and coming into her own.In “The Souvenir,” released in 2019, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a film school student in 1980s London. Her relationship with Anthony, a witty, debonair older man, goes off the rails as it emerges that he’s addicted to heroin. “The Souvenir Part II,” which opens Oct. 29, follows a solo Julie working out her voice as a person and as a director — a new rich chapter of experience where a single film might have declared “The End.”“You don’t normally have that opportunity with the story, to have a break in the middle and think about what you’re doing and approach things differently the second way,” Hogg said in an interview at a downtown hotel the day after her movie’s New York Film Festival premiere last month. (Part II takes place only a few days after Part I but was shot two years later.)Until recently, her films have been like a much-beloved secret. “Joanna Hogg — where have you been all my movie-loving life?” Manohla Dargis wrote when the director’s first three features were finally released in the United States in 2014. A.O. Scott called the first part “an absolute joy to watch.” Distributed by the brand-savvy A24, “The Souvenir Part II” is the latest entry in Hogg’s ardently admired oeuvre.Her fans include Ari Aster, director of “Midsommar,” who said in an email, “At her best, she lends a subtle, deeply individual strangeness to the quotidian.” He praised her as “a fastidious and texture-obsessed diarist in the best sense.” Another fan: President Barack Obama, who counted “Part I” among his favorite movies of 2019.The Scottish novelist Ali Smith (“Summer”), who once screened Hogg’s work in an arts festival, said via email, “Her films are beautiful things in the world, and witty, hyper-intelligent, scalpel-sharp, simultaneously merciless and deeply humane.” Smith added, “She takes class apart, she has a clear eye across the traditions that skewer us or vitalize us.”Julie’s story draws closely on Hogg’s memories. Like Julie, Hogg studied filmmaking in the 1980s, at the National Film and Television School, and dated a devastatingly charming man with an all-consuming drug addiction. And Julie’s background, like Hogg’s, is solidly upper middle class. Visits to the country home of Julie’s parents punctuate both films; artifacts, clothing and photos from Hogg’s life appear throughout, too. “Part I” broaches the notion of privilege, as Julie faces teachers skeptical of her initial proposal to make a film about a struggling port city. “Part II” sees her coming out of her shell and, as Hogg put it, “joining the world, joining life.”Honor Swinton Byrne, left, and Tilda Swinton in “The Souvenir Part II.”Sandro Kopp/A24Hogg went onto a career in British television and did not direct her first theatrical feature until 2007 at age 47: “Unrelated,” starring Tom Hiddleston, also making his feature debut. “The Souvenir Part II” imagines a different trajectory for Julie, giving her a freedom Hogg did not have at the time.“I didn’t get to make a film at film school that spoke about the relationship that I’d been in,” the director said. Friendly and low-key in a subdued dark top and pants, she chose her words firmly but with a dry, winningly modest sense of understatement that would fit without a rustle right into a Joanna Hogg film. “It was important for her to be less naïve and therefore more in control of her life and therefore her story.”The ties of friends and family are further entwined through Hogg’s cast. The director knew Swinton Byrne as the daughter of an old schoolmate, Tilda Swinton. (Hogg is Swinton Byrne’s godmother.) Swinton starred in Hogg’s real graduate film, “Caprice,” and plays Julie’s doting mother in both parts of “The Souvenir.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Yet Swinton Byrne was cast less than a month before shooting on “Part I” began. Hogg was visiting Swinton about playing Julie’s mother but still didn’t have a Julie.“I was getting onto a train to go back to London, and Honor was arriving from London coming home,” Hogg said. The two chatted on the platform about “what it is to be in your early 20s,” and for Hogg it just “clicked.”“I feel like I was very like Julie when I was a bit younger. You know how insecure it is,” Swinton Byrne, 23, said, bubbly over the phone from Edinburgh, where she’s studying psychology after a teaching stint in Namibia, among other things. (“My mom says that I’m still not fully baked yet,” she said, laughing.)Swinton Byrne’s Julie reckons with the past in “The Souvenir Part II” but spends a lot of time on a soundstage, leading her crew and explaining motivations to her actors. (Her classmates include a hilariously biting Richard Ayoade.)Hogg “dramatizes the fragmentary life of the imagination, completing a story that was full of hesitations in the first place,” the critic Molly Haskell said in an email, invoking Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. “To my mind, the only remotely analogous cinematic experiment of recent years is Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy.”Hogg’s two-part idea — which she dates at least to a journal entry in 1988 — wasn’t a sure thing. She had planned to shoot both films at the same time, until a financier pulled out. Another twist involved Robert Pattinson, who was slated for a role (later reworked) in “Part II” but was tied up with “Tenet” instead. (No hard feelings from Hogg: “I hope that I’ll work with him in the future.”)“I wanted desperately to make them at the same time, because I thought there was a danger that if I just made the first one, I wouldn’t get the opportunity to make the second one,” Hogg recalled.Today, she is grateful for the extra time and even believes the second part would have been “a shadow of its current self” if she’d shot both movies together.It’s easy to see this ability to adapt and find an alchemy in the shifts of reality as part of her filmmaking style. Despite her movies’ precise ear for the spoken word, Hogg doesn’t write traditional screenplays, giving actors the space to come up with dialogue. She lets scenes unfold at length, often with room-wide shots that allow us to soak in the give-and-take.One tragicomic sequence in her “Archipelago,” starring Hiddleston, observes a family dither dysfunctionally over where to sit at a restaurant. (“Never has the term ‘faffing about’ been so perfectly illustrated,” the critic Jonathan Romney wrote approvingly in The Independent.)Alex Heeney, who co-wrote a monograph about Joanna Hogg, told me, “Hogg’s films are less about duration than they are about how people orbit each other and how their spaces facilitate or prevent this.” In “The Souvenir,” she added, Julie “has to work to become the protagonist in her own life, and that’s not taken lightly.”Hogg is already editing her next film “The Eternal Daughter,” a ghost story starring Swinton. In the meantime, Hogg’s “Souvenir” star, Swinton Byrne, seemed still to be reflecting on her character’s two-part journey.“It is like watching a friend get up on her feet after a really intense breakup or intense loss,” she said. “It’s what I waited for a long time, to see Julie, who I see as a friend, become a full person.” More

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      Is Moviegoing Undemocratic?

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      The plan to distribute the art-house film “Memoria” in one theater at a time has set off a heated debate over whether the idea is elitist or inspired.I saw “Memoria” during the New York Film Festival, projected on a screen in a room somewhere other than my house. It’s a strange, captivating movie, graceful and elusive, with a distinctive pedigree. Starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is from Thailand, “Memoria” was shot in Colombia and will be that country’s official selection for the Academy Awards. At once emotionally resonant and tricky to describe, it’s the kind of challenging movie that critics embrace in the hope that it might find an audience beyond the festival circuit.It will have that chance, though not in the usual way. On Tuesday, Neon — the art-house distributor that brought the Cannes prizewinners “Parasite” and “Titane” to North American moviegoers — announced plans to release “Memoria” later this year. As first reported in IndieWire, Neon will open the film in New York in December, after which it will move “from city to city, theater to theater, week by week, playing in front of only one solitary audience at any given time.” No itinerary has yet been released, but one place you will not be able to see Weerasethakul’s movie is in your living room. According to IndieWire, “it will not become available on DVD, on demand, or streaming platforms.”Never? I suspect there will be a Criterion Blu-ray one of these days. In the meantime, Neon’s news caused a predictable kerfuffle on film Twitter, whose denizens like nothing better than a heated argument about a movie very few people have seen. The set-to in this case was between those who applauded the “Memoria” strategy as a defense of the aesthetic superiority of going to the movies and those who scorned it as elitist and exclusionary.Here we go again. In general, I take a noncombatant position in the streaming wars. I’m in favor of people seeing movies in the best possible conditions, and I’m aware that sometimes those conditions will be fulfilled on the home screen. If you can’t make it to the cinema, the cinema can come to you. Clear sound, full screen — can’t lose.I also think that the terms of the streaming vs. theater debate are misguided. How is it that a quintessentially democratic cultural activity — buying a ticket and some popcorn and finding a seat in the dark — has been reclassified as a snobbish, specialized fetish? The answer, I think, is a form of pseudo-populist techno-triumphalism that takes what seems to be the easiest mode of consumption as, by definition, the most progressive. Loyalty to older ways of doing things looks at best quaint, at worst reactionary and in any case irrational. Why wouldn’t you put your movie out there where everyone could see it?Everyone, that is, who subscribes to a given streaming platform or pays retail for video on demand. Netflix is not a public utility. Furthermore, the universal accessibility that is part of the ideology of streaming looks in practice more like a kind of invisibility. If you can watch a given movie whenever you want, you never have to watch it at all. Or you can pause after a few minutes, check out something else and maybe come back the next night. A partially read book can shame you from the night stand, but an unstreamed movie drifts alone in the ether.That is the fate “Memoria” is resisting. As an object and an experience, it resists the rhythms of home viewing to begin with. Swinton’s character, an expatriate named Jessica, seems literally lost in space and time, experiencing the world in a way that alienates her from other people and her own consciousness. She hears noises inaudible to anyone else and finds companions who may not exist. We don’t know if the explanation is psychological or supernatural, or whether Weerasethakul is dabbling in science fiction, metaphysics or some of each. What we do know is that the streets of Bogotá and the lush slopes of the Andes look beautiful in 35 millimeter, and that the sounds and images cast a delicate spell.The magic may require a theatrical setting. Abstract, slow-moving films that aren’t propelled by dialogue or plot don’t lend themselves naturally to couch-bound, distraction-prone viewing. Weird movies are best seen in the company of strangers. Did you see what I saw? What was it, anyway? The algorithm won’t help you.“Memoria” is hardly alone in demanding a different kind of attention, and it’s unlikely that the week-by-week, one-theater-at-a-time release strategy will become a widespread business model. But there is something beautiful, even utopian in the idea that another way of looking is possible, that habits can be broken. That we might have to go find movies out in the world, where they are looking for us. More

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      How the Cannes Film Festival Changed

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      How the Cannes Film Festival ChangedStephanie GoodmanIn New York, watching France 🇫🇷 Violette Franchi for The New York TimesThe Cannes Film Festival returned after a year off. Unlike other festivals, which went online during the pandemic, Cannes organizers had vowed to wait until an in-person event was possible.All is not exactly back to normal → More

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      ‘The Human Voice’ Review: Almodóvar Meets Cocteau Meets Swinton

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      The first English-language film from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar stars Tilda Swinton and adapts Jean Cocteau to sublime results.A woman is brought to the end of her rope by a recalcitrant former lover. In what could be their last exchange, she speaks to the man over the phone. She cajoles, she feigns composure, she sneers, she renounces — things get kind of crazy.Sounds like a Pedro Almodóvar movie. It was, and it is again. It’s a little complicated.This movie, a mere 30 minutes in length but as fully fleshed out as almost any feature by the dazzling Spanish filmmaker, is an adaptation of the venerable 1930 monodrama “La Voix Humaine,” a magnificent actress’s aria by Jean Cocteau. Back in 1988, Almodóvar borrowed its narrative elements for his film “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which helped the director advance into the mainstream. Previously, he’d been a near-underground cult figure.Almodóvar had been planning to make an English-language film for some time, and now he’s done it, working with the British actress Tilda Swinton. Does this sound like a match made in heaven? Yeah, it pretty much is. Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.The credits specify that this is a “free” adaptation of the Cocteau work. One factor of that freedom is that the monologue doesn’t begin until about 10 minutes in — unlike Cocteau’s work. But Almodóvar’s own poetic spirit meshes nicely with that of the old master’s throughout. Hardly surprising.The Human VoiceRated R for language. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 30 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More