Something to watch tonight: Monday 17 July

Memoria (Weerasethakul, 2022) is renting on Arovision now

A couple of Fridays ago I was doing my usu­al 9.45 appear­ance on RNZ Nights (with Mark Leishman) and I chose to talk about the new rela­tion­ship between Whānau Marama New Zealand International Film Festival and Arovision.

NZIFF used to have its own video on demand ser­vice but wisely they have decided that is not core busi­ness and partnered up with the on demand side of the ven­er­able Aro Street Video Store who have cur­ated a selec­tion of playl­ists from past fest­ivals for you to enjoy.

This is espe­cially good news for Arovision as it will be the suc­cess of this ven­ture that dic­tates wheth­er the phys­ic­al Aro Street store will be able to con­tin­ue oper­at­ing and that fam­ous 27,000 title col­lec­tion be kept together.

That radio seg­ment gave me the oppor­tun­ity to revis­it one of my favour­ite films of the last few years, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria which played in the 2021 festival.

I was lucky enough to review this remark­able pieces of work for At the Movies last year and wrote this:

Tilda Swinton plays a Scottish flower whole­saler in Medellin, Colombia, vis­it­ing her sis­ter who is in hos­pit­al in the cap­it­al Bogota. One morn­ing she is woken up by a loud bang. There appears to be no source for the sound – no con­struc­tion work, no car acci­dent – and over the next few days it hap­pens sev­er­al more times and she real­ises that no one else can hear it.

It’s a little bit like those American dip­lo­mats in Cuba who were con­vinced they were under some psycho-auditory attack by the Russians but no one could find a source for what they were hearing.

…

As the film goes on the mys­ter­ies deep­en. Despite a bur­geon­ing friend­ship with the sound engin­eer, she returns to the uni­ver­sity to find no one has heard of him. She returns to Medellin and meets a man scal­ing fish by the side of a stream who has the same name as the sound engin­eer. We are increas­ingly becom­ing aware that Swinton’s char­ac­ter isn’t hav­ing a psy­cho­lo­gic­al break­down but may just be exper­i­en­cing some oth­er planes of the uni­verse, lay­ers not nor­mally avail­able to the rest of us because we don’t oper­ate on the cor­rect frequencies.

…

There surely is no bet­ter act­or and col­lab­or­at­or for this sort of thing than Swinton who is simply mar­vel­lous. There is a sequence near the end where the cam­era very gently zooms in on her at a kit­chen table as she – and we – hear a sound­scape of layered com­mu­nic­a­tions from … some­where else and it is as if you are watch­ing the Star Child sequence at the end of 2001 through the medi­um of one actor’s face.

I’m more relaxed that I was then about Memoria being watched out­side of a cinema but I do recom­mend that you avoid as many aud­ible dis­trac­tions as pos­sible. Sound is so import­ant to this pic­ture and I’m not sure if it will have the same impact in a noisy environment.

Memoria is avail­able to rent for $6.99 from Arovision. I’m sure it’s on oth­er plat­forms but – because of their import­ance to the whole eco­sys­tem right now – I am pre­fer­ring Arovision links. There’s also a Blu-ray from Madman Entertainment.

Further Reading and Listening

I have just pos­ted the first of my 2023 NZIFF pre­views to RNZ fea­tur­ing EO (Skolimowski, 2022), Asteroid City (Anderson, 2023) and Inside (Katsoupis, 2023). There’ll be a few more drop­ping this week. NZIFF starts in Auckland on Wednesday.

On Sunday Afternoon, I spoke with Ant Timpson about 30 years of the Incredibly Strange Film Festival (now a strand of Whānau Marama New Zealand International Film Festival.