'Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest is more elusive and even more enveloping than his other beguiling films.' | Kathleen Sachs
Recently something happened to me that I hadn’t experienced in a while—I heard the sound of a telephone ringing outside my window. It sounded just as it did when I’d experienced this before, when I was younger and landlines were more common. It’s always a telephone ringing but muffled, like it’s coming from inside a home or car.
Something similar happens to Jessica in writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest masterpiece, screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center on 35-millimeter through Thursday, April 21. The film opens with her being woken up by a loud, dull bang, which she initially supposes to be from construction happening by where she’s staying in Bogotá. Jessica is a Scottish expat and an orchidologist, living in Colombia near her sister and brother-in-law.
Jessica continues to hear this noise intermittently—for example, while out to dinner with her sister and her family, celebrating the former’s recovery from a cryptic illness that they’re discussing as possibly being due to her work researching a reclusive civilization; mysterious ailments are a commonplace phenomena in Weerasethakul’s films—and soon attempts to realize the sound with the help of an audio engineer, Hernán .
As usual, Swinton gives an astonishing performance, lending nuance to Weerasethakul’s exquisitely subtle story; here especially she gives herself over to the director’s caprices. She’s less Tilda Swinton the art-house icon and more waking phantasm, a figure from Weerasethakul’s dreams, a vessel for his inviolable prophecies to take shape. Surmising Swinton to be the film’s star, however, would be to overlook its most important element: sound.
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