Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name

Oliver: Armie Hammer
Elio: Timothée Chalamet
Mr. Perlman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Annella Perlman: Amira Casar
Marzia: Esther Garrel
Chiara: Victoire Du Bois
Mafalda: Vanda Capriolo
Anchise: Antonio Rimoldi
Mounir: André Aciman
Isaac: Peter Spears

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: James Ivory
Based on a novel by André Aciman
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production design: Samuel Deshors
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Nobody dies or gets beaten up in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, which makes it something of an advance on previous Oscar-nominated films about same-sex relationships such as Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), which carried the implicit warning that being gay is dangerous. On the other hand, that's because the film's characters are people in a supposedly tolerant milieu, an haute middle-class academic family, not cowboys or residents of housing projects. Otherwise, we're still dealing with sexual "deviance" and its societal consequences, which in Elio's case include a sensitive and well-meaning Talk from his father, a phone call in which Oliver announces that he's going to marry a woman he's been seeing for a while, and an extended closing shot of Elio weeping into the fireplace. Don't get me wrong: I like Call Me by Your Name, in which Guadagnino and his handsome, skilled actors beautifully sustain a mood of sexual tension throughout the film. The problem I have with it is that it seems compromised by what its producers and director believe a mainstream film is allowed to show audiences these days. Put it another way, if the characters in the scene in which two people consummate their relationship were male and female, would the director have panned away from the bed to a window for a lingering view of a tree? That's a cliché as old as movie love scenes, redolent of a bygone era of censorship. So instead of watching even a discreetly filmed moment of sexual congress, which we've grown used to in "straight" movies -- all deftly angled closeups of apparently nude bodies and orgasmic faces -- we're treated like easily shocked children. It's especially noticeable after the director has already taken the usual discreet approach twice in scenes in which Elio has sex with Marzia. Reportedly, James Ivory's Oscar-winning screenplay specified full nudity and more explicit sex in the scenes with Elio and Oliver, but Guadagnino shied away. The result is a kind of emasculation of their relationship, turning Call Me by Your Name into all foreplay and no climax.

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."

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.