Not the subtitles. The captions.
Which is especially embarrassing because there is not a heck of a lot of dialogue in this movie, as you would expect from a movie by the man who goes by "Joe" as a nickname. The other of his films I've seen, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendor, are similarly lacking in spoken words.
But what got me about this film was a scene in a hospital between Tilda Swinton and the woman playing her character's sister, Agnes Brekke, while the sister is laid up in bed with a chronic illness.
The two actresses are speaking in such hushed tones, and have such thick accents, that my brain just couldn't form the usual function of hearing most of the words and figuring out the unheard words from context clues. Nope, I just couldn't understand any of the words.
Reluctantly, and with a sense of shame, I turned on the captions.
When I watched the scene again with the captions, I felt, "Well of course that's what they were saying." But I was only able to obtain this sort of clarity because I was seeing the words that started the sentence, meaning I could now hear which words finished it.
Well I was glad I did it, I suppose, because Swinton also has dialogue in English with the man playing her sister's husband, Daniel Gimenez Cacho, whose English is Spanish-accented and also hard to understand.
Funnily enough, though, I had to turn them off again when the film became Spanish language pretty much for the rest of its running time (it's set in Colombia), because now the captions were actively hindering my understanding of what was being said.
See, in order to try to create the full experience for a person who can't hear any of the dialogue, the captions insisted on informing us "Jessica speaks in a foreign language" -- a note that actually partially obscured the film's embedded subtitles for the Spanish. So I found myself in the absurd position of trying to read through the captions in order to see what was being said. Once I had made the assessment that English was not going to be this film's default language, I turned them off again and had a better time from there. (I guess the default language of English was chosen because Swinton is British and the film's first dialogue was in English?)
(And by the way, are the captions really so unacquainted with what language this might be? You can't just say that Jessica is speaking Spanish?)
So why is it so embarrassing not to be able to understand English with a heavy accent?
I think it speaks to a person's sense of their own worldliness. Like, if I think of myself as a cultured man who watches plenty of British content -- just as an example -- I should be able to make out the different sounds of the words just from experience. Heck, I live in a country where everybody speaks with an accent, relative to what I'm used to. If you can't understand it, it's like you're some rube who falls outside his comfort zone as soon as they stop speaking American English.
But this is not some matter of pride. Sure you could fight through a whole movie this way, and you might do that in a setting where you don't want to reveal the struggle you're having to others watching it with you. But if you're sitting there by yourself, failing to comprehend things that may be important for your understanding of the meaning of the film, there's not a lot you can do about it. It's not like understanding language is just a matter of trying harder. If your brain can't do the work, your brain can't do the work, and the pace of most dialogue means you'll fall behind fatally in no time.
One thing I did/do find interesting about captions, or in this case subtitles, is that they allow you to clearly understand something that might be getting said very quietly. It might be the filmmaker's desire -- especially in the case of someone like "Joe" -- to make it intentionally difficult to hear something that's very quiet. The decision is made, then, that if any person can hear it, it should be captioned and/or subtitled. I guess it's just one of those things we must live with if we are going to watch movies made in languages that we don't speak.
I'd say Memoria is easily my favorite "Joe" movie, and it was cruising toward a 4.5 stars on Letterboxd until I felt a little unsatisfied with how it resolves (or doesn't resolve, as the case may be with Weerasethakul). However, I've got to stop watching movies like Memoria in the evening of a night where I've gone for a run in the morning. I ultimately had to finish it Saturday night after a nap during the movie on Friday didn't end until 2:40 a.m.
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