Apichatpong's Next Film Uses Cell Phones as the Only Sign of Which Era You're In
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's follow-up to Memory has a formal device that costs almost nothing and does a great deal: 1970s sci-fi aesthetics inside a world with no other period markers except cell phones. A phone in frame is the whole clock. In Jengira's Magnificent Dream, a Thai widow named Jengira travels to the ancient rock forest of Sigiriya in central Sri Lanka to scatter her husband's ashes, and the film blurs the boundaries between memory, history and the supernatural. Tilda Swinton, who starred in Memory, is attached. Piano — the Mexican production and distribution company behind Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winning Triangle of Sadness — has boarded the project. There is something pleasing about a film that treats time as a property of objects rather than of calendars. Most movies announce their era with cars, costumes and hairstyles; this one asks you to notice a screen.
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It is also a ruthless production choice. Period detail is expensive and often wrong; a single handheld object does the expository work of an entire art department, and it lets the same landscape serve every century.
Elegant until it has to carry too much. A prop asked to be the only temporal marker in a film about memory and the supernatural risks reading as a gimmick — every ring or flashlight beam becomes a puzzle piece the audience is told to solve.