Acknowledging that there might be much in the way of context which I could not grasp, and that perhaps it was overkill to watch three Apichatpong films in a week, I have to say that Cemetery of Splendour was the first to try my patience, and not really work for me. Which, as noted, might be down to circumstances. At the same time this also appears to reveal quite how delicate a process this kind of meditative filmmaking is. A hair’s breadth too drawn out, which is what the long cemetery sequence at the end felt like, or too solipsistic, and the experience runs the risk of becoming torpid, and the film of appearing self-indulgent. Cemetery of Splendour is constructed around the idea of sleeping sickness affecting soldiers in Thailand, but I struggled to understand who these soldiers were and why they had been struck down. All the questions which shouldn’t come to mind started to interfere and I felt as though I has been left outside of some kind of magic circle with all the real action happening over there, behind the screen, just out of sight.
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