Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)

Jenjira: Jenjira Pongpas
Itt: Banlop Lomnoi
Keng: Jarinpatta Rueangram
Nurse Tet: Petcharat Chaiburi
Teng: Sakda Kaewbuadee
Goddess 1: Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw
Goddess 2: Bhattaratorn Senkraigul
Richard Widner: Richard Abramson

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Diego Garcia
Art direction: Pichan Muangduang
Film editing: Lee Chatametikool

As I said in my brief note about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), I feel handicapped by my ignorance of Southeast Asian history and culture when I watch Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. I can appreciate them aesthetically but there are layers of significance hidden to me. Yet the more I watch his films, the more they draw me in, the more they linger in my thoughts, even stray ones when I'm not specifically concerned with trying to comprehend a particular film. His long takes, often with the key characters in the middle distance rather than in closeup, allow things to stray into the frame, the way a hen and her chickens do at one moment. They allow the eye to wander, and to wonder at the details of setting. In another filmmaker these would be distractions, but since Weerasethakul is not urgently concerned with telling a story, the distractions provide texture and surprise. We Westerners are not used to films that force us to contemplate -- I don't think any filmmaker since the art-house heyday of Antonioni and Resnais has so carefully taken the time to give us extended contemplative moments as Weerasethakul does. Is it, I sometimes wonder, the "exotic" quality of his settings that keeps us from boredom as we watch scenes in which nothing much happens?  But enough does happen in Cemetery of Splendor that I'm driven to keep watching and waiting for a theme or even a mood to resolve itself. Sometimes the things that do happen seem gratuitous, as when we watch a group of people in a park by a lake begin to swap places, moving from one bench to another, as in a dance or a game with no discernible rules. Sometimes they're strikingly beautiful, as in the slow dissolve from an Escher-like intersection of escalators to the light poles that stand beside the beds in the hospital. There is a wizardry in Cemetery of Splendor that gives it magic. But then I read that the film is in some ways a commentary on the politics of Thailand, and I'm brought up short by my own ignorance.

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

Dr. Toey: Nantarat Swaddikul
Dr. Nohng: Jaruchai Iamaran
Noom. the Orchid Specialist: Sophon Pukanok
Toa: Nu Nimsonboom
Pa Jane: Jenjira Pongpas
Ple, the Dentist: Arkanae Cherkam
Sakda, a Monk: Sakda Kaewbuadee
Old Monk: Sin Kaewpakpin

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Sayombhyu Mukdeeprom
Art direction: Akekarat Homlaor
Film editing: Lee Chatametikool
Music: Kantee Anantagant

Syndromes and a Century is the kind of film that is apt to have some people say, "It's like watching paint dry." And that's what makes it so fascinating. During the long stretches in which the viewer has nothing to do but watch an odd dark oval, the aperture of some kind of device that seems to be vacuuming up smoke from a room full of mysterious medical equipment, we're left with nothing to do but meditate on how that oval suggests a black hole, or how it echoes a solar eclipse earlier in the film, or how medical technology seems alien, or to wonder nervously whether the hospital in which the scene takes place is on fire. Things happen in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film; sometimes they even happen twice, a kind of reincarnation of earlier events -- Weerasethakul is fascinated by the belief in past lives. But the events are there for us to assemble in our imaginations: The film isn't going to that work for us. A doctor has a somewhat oddball interview with a job applicant, who later reveals that he's madly in love with her, whereupon she tells him of her inconclusive relationship with a man who collects orchids. A dentist works on a patient, a Buddhist monk in saffron robes, and begins singing to him. Later, the two meet in a scene in which the dentist speculates on whether the monk might be the reincarnation of the brother for whose accidental death he blames himself. It's also clear that the dentist has something of a crush on the monk. A young doctor's girlfriend wants him to move with her to a burgeoning new city, and shows him pictures of the industrial construction there as if it were some kind of enticement. They start to make out and he gets an erection. An older doctor, a hematologist, tries to treat a younger doctor's patient, who has suffered from carbon monoxide inhalation, by healing his chakras. When it doesn't work, the young doctor tells her he had already tried that. And so on, through various incidents that somehow echo one another but stubbornly refuse to be assimilated into a conventional narrative. Unlike Weerasethakul's other films, Syndromes and a Century take place in a scientific culture at which untamed nature only laps furtively around the edges. The settings are modern hospitals, not plantations or jungles, and there are no ghosts or forest monsters on hand. But for all that, the world remains as haunted and mysterious as the worlds seen in Tropical Malady (2004) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Weerasethakul has been compared to Michelangelo Antonioni in his technique of introducing situations and settings that never quite resolve themselves into completed stories, but where Antonioni was filled with angst by the world's intractable conflicts, Weerasethakul seems content to enjoy the mystery without worrying about its implications.

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000)

Conceived and edited by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Plasong Klimborron, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

We tell stories to try to find meaning in what our senses provide us from the bewilderment of force and matter in which we exist. Stories become myths which become religions which eventually become science, our only bulwark of knowledge. Even when we sleep, our dreams are stories crafted out of the incessant neural storm. So it's not surprising that we love stories so much that we spend much of our lives telling them and hearing them. The story around which Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon whirls is begun by a traumatized young woman, who has just told her own story of being sold into servitude by her own father. Prompted to tell another story, one that she has heard or read, she speaks of a boy who can't walk, so he's tutored by a young woman. One day, she excuses herself from the lesson to go to the bathroom, and when she doesn't return soon, the boy rolls his wheelchair to another room where he finds the teacher unconscious. As he tries to move her to a bed, a mysterious object rolls out from her skirts. And there the young woman's story stops, only to be continued across the country of Thailand by a number of willing narrators prompted by the director and his crew. In the various elaborations on the premise, the teacher receives a name, "Dogfahr."* The object transforms itself into a boy, but one with shape-shifting powers, so he also takes the form of the teacher herself, leading to a confrontation between Dogfahr and her doppelgänger. Some narrators attempt to provide a backstory for the disabled boy: He survived a plane crash during the war that killed his parents. The story takes on political and social overtones, as well as being colored by movies and TV shows. The narrators range from villagers to a traveling troupe of players to a group of eager schoolchildren, as well as the filmmaker himself, who tries to convert these stories into a movie. The result is a fascinating mélange of fable and fact, of the imagination and the literal reality of Thailand as seen through Weerasethakul's camera eye. It's a hypernarrative: a story about telling stories.

*That transliteration appears in the subtitles, but it's often seen as "Dokfa" in sources that attempt to translate the film's original title, "Dokfa in the Devil's Hand."

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

Sakda Kaewbuadee and Banlop Lomnoi in Tropical Malady

Keng: Banlop Lomnoi
Tong: Sakda Kaewbuadee

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Jarin Pengpanitch, Vichit Tanapanitch, Jean-Louis Vialard
Production design: Akekarat Homlaor
Film editing: Lee Chatametikool, Jacopo Quadri

Tropical Malady comes in two not-quite-discrete segments. The first is a more-or-less realistic account of the romance of Keng, a soldier, with Tong, a farmboy Keng meets during a mission to recover a body. The second part is an elaboration on a kind of ghost story in which a soldier (also played by Banlop Lomnoi) goes into the jungle to search for a missing villager, and there encounters the spirit of a shaman (also played by Sakda Kaewbuadee) who can turn himself into a tiger. Although the first part is mostly a love story, it is as shadowy in its way as the second part, beginning with the discover of the body -- and the soldiers' glee in having their photographs taken with the corpse -- and ending with Tong's disappearance into the dark, after which Keng rides his motor scooter past a group of men beating up another man and then pursuing Keng. Although the narrative of Tropical Malady is more conventionally handled than that of Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), there are some clear links between the two films, including the fact that Kaewbuadee plays a character named Tong in both, and in Tropical Malady refers to his uncle who can recall his past lives. There's also a key scene in both films set in a cavern, along with an obvious preoccupation with the spirit world. If there's a theme that runs through both, it's that of the thinness of the boundary between civilization and the primitive world, or between body and spirit.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Wallapa Mongkolprasert in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Boonmee: Thanapat Saisaymar
Jen: Jenjira Pongpas
Tong: Sakda Kaewbuadee
Huay: Natthakarn Aphaiwonk
Boonsong: Geerasak Kulhong
Princess: Wallapa Mongkolprasert
Roong: Kanokporn Tongaram
Jaai: Samud Kugasang

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production design: Akekarat Homlaor
Film editing: Lee Chatametikool

I think I would have to be more familiar with Southeast Asian history and culture to fully appreciate Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, especially to understand the relationship between the Thai landowner Boonmee and the Laotians who work on his farm. My ignorance only adds another layer of mystery to an enigmatic film.