cemetery of splendour (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

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. 

mysterious object at noon (d. apichatpong weerasethakul)

Mysterious Object at Noon would appear to be Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first full length feature. A doc/ drama, it combines an immersive trip through rural and urban Thailand, with the narration of what appears to be a folk story about two sisters/ teachers who are the same person, or who replace each other, which is of course something of an Apichatpong trope. At one point the film shows a set of travelling players giving an open air performance of the story to a village, with the actresses wearing identical, beautiful costumes. The viewer has to do quite a bit of work to stitch the story together, and the fact that there is no definitive version is revealed by the sequence at the end, where a group of school kids offer up their differing versions of how the story should end, which all seem to feature a bewitched tiger. Many of the tropes of his later work are therefore present, like tantalising clues. It was also notable, the day after watching Memoria, how similar rural Thailand looks to rural Colombia. The film helps to determine the director’s aesthetic, taking the viewer into a sensory exploration of modern Thailand in all its languid diversity. 

memoria (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

I picked the perfect evening to go and watch Memoria. There are some days in your life when you want nothing more than to be plunged into a dense, visionary spectacle. Memoria delivered in spades. Only the goofiest, most irreverent of creators gets to smash the system with so much glee. In which regard this film made me think of other Latin based films which somehow manage to interrogate the edge-of-life feeling which the islands of life and empty spaces lend to Latin America, those being the films of Reygadas and the recently viewed Latin excursion of Wong Kar Wai.

I don’t know why Apichatpong chose to film in Colombia, but in so many ways it works. From the flash scene of kids dancing in the square of a remote town to the moment a man falls to the floor in Medellin, scared he has been shot, and then starts running, the film locates pinpricks of Colombian life that pepper the movie, that make it feel it is of that place, despite the multinational creative team. The scene set in the uni courtyard is another, as is Swinton’s character just drifting into a jazz rehearsal in a cramped room, with other students watching with blank but attentive faces. The detail feels both improvised and pitch perfect. Something that surprised me about the film, was the sly humour which Swinton embraces as well, with several scenes provoking an entirely unexpected laughter.

Memoria is a quest film, as Swinton goes looking for the source of her auditory hallucination and finds that it was either to do with someone hiding under a bed in a remote tropical village or it was the departure of an alien spaceship, or both. It is also, one supposes, a premonition of a death she has already lived. At some points it could almost be said that everything gets a bit M Night Shyamalan, not that anyone else would probably think that.

Don’t watch this film at home unless you are properly stoned, or it is the middle of the night when nothing and no-one is going to disturb you. If possible, watch it in on a vast screen in a near empty sala. Let the sounds disconcert you. Strain to hear every word. Watch Tilda’s face become a mask of Tilda’s face. Watch the dead walk amongst you. Dream about your origins as you ride the clouds with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in no particular hurry to discover where you are going or where you have come from.