Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000)
Thai Title: Dokfa nai meuman

In Syndromes and a Century (2006), Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul inserts a scene of a tube sucking the mist that has covered the hospital which is so abrupt and compelling that it instantly reorients your senses and prepares you for what's to come, an epilogue that transports the film entirely from the hospital and its hushed affairs to an outdoor park of a possible future time where the populace are doing aerobics and a group of Buddhist monks are playing with a toy UFO in what feels like an atmosphere of tranquil celebration. It is abrupt in a way that the film's normally measured and sedative pace and its calming and earthy aesthetics composed of captivating greens and sunlit exteriors and interiors are suddenly replaced with something distinctly mechanical and perspectively jarring with its cold, blue and alien-looking visuals and the exhausting although gripping sound that accompanies it.

Weerasethakul's debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon has a similar sequence, although not as visually and aurally apparent. An elegant string of dolly shots of empty spaces accompanies the story of a school kid about a Witch Tiger before completely concluding the longer half of the film. "At noon," the subtitle declares as it opens once again to scenes of school children playing soccer or swimming at a nearby waterhole or playing with chickens and dogs. The sequence of dolly shots has the same reorienting effect as the metal pipe scene in Syndromes and a Century. The tendency of Mysterious Object at Noon is to completely humanize the storytelling process by putting human faces and experiences behind the evolution of a tale but suddenly at that instance, Weerasethakul withdraws as if to enjoy a restful breath from his gargantuan experiment, and allows his camera to just mechanically capture images of blank and normally insignificant space, through the predictably horizontal movement of the dolly before stopping at a view from the window, sunlit and rejuvinating. That is perhaps the most amazing part of Weerasethakul's mesmerizing debut, the part wherein he branches off from his cinematic experiment to just watch and become passive observer to the lives he has documented. It reinforces the punctuated malleability of his cinema as it transforms, transports and disappears without abandoning the themes and feelings it has consciously invested in.

The film starts with the camera resting inside a vendor truck, capturing the highways, the alleyways and the buildings being passed by as a radio melodrama plays in the background. The experiment officially begins when a teary-eyed interviewee, a fish sauce vendor, tells her heartbreaking story about how she was sold by her parents to her uncle. The interviewer interrupts her and asks her to tell another story whether real or not, and the story she initiates concerns a crippled boy and his teacher named Dogfahr. At once, Weerasethakul blurs fact from fiction as he favors imagined stories to those that are based from real life experiences. Moreover, he cuts to a dramatized version of the fictional tale, often incorporating real footages to forward the more traditionally directed narrative, as a helpful accessory to his narrative experiment, supposedly to accommodate his viewers with a visual and surreptitiously mystical representation of his subjects' manufactured tales. In another of Weerasethakul's curious yet mysteriously compelling decisions, he abandons this dramatization by including in the film a portion wherein these characters convert back into their real selves, paid actors who are having their lunch break. It's a hilarious turn, one that infinitely keeps the film tiptoeing from fiction to documentary, documentary to fiction, and so on.

The central story of the crippled kid and Dogfahr mutates every time it is continued by another interviewee and by film's end, the tale of the boy and his teacher becomes so outrageously ridiculous that it becomes irrelevant. Instead, what stays with you is an intriguing glimpse at a national state of mind, a communal psychology, from what has been minutely gleaned from their connected contributions to the fiction-making. Weerasethakul selects his subjects from a wide demographic from repentant sauce vendors, drunken grandmothers, traveling performers, mute and deaf children and rowdy school kids, all of which contribute little yet gleaming aspects of their lives and ways of living as they steer the narrative to surprising directions ranging from a ball turning into a lonely alien child (from a group of young men), a romantic conquest filled with pangs of jealousy and envy (as performed by the traveling performers), a hard tale of social and economic trials (from the mute and deaf ladies), to a juvenile conclusion that involves revenge, swords, and killer tigers (from the rowdy school kids).

Aside from the vast demographic of his subjects, Weerasethakul keeps the film in a continuous state of transit. The invented story itself takes place in both rural and urban Thailand and Weerasethakul seems obliged to insert footages of transit, from the introductory travelogue in urban Thailand to the scenes that happen within a passenger train. This is a subconscious concern that is dictated by the communal mind scape of a nation that is infatuated with the concept of progress, most commonly represented by migration from the rural areas to the urbanized city of Bangkok. It is both unsurprising yet very much revealing how this conceptual need to move makes itself apparent in the fiction created by the film's subjects since it has been a consistent preoccupation, at least by the masses of the countryside, to equate progress with urbanity. Such is a preoccupation shared by Thailand with most of its Southeast Asian neighbors which is perhaps a by-product of its indelible attraction with Western ideals and so-called virtues.

Weerasethakul has crafted what arguably is the most daring first film of any recent director. In a national cinema that has long survived churning out populist melodramas, horror pictures, trite comedic and action films, and its many derivatives, Weerasethakul defiantly branches out with a film that is drastically confident and unique in form, style, and substance. Draped as a low budget documentary, shot on 16mm in black and white, before morphing into a completely different creature, a fascinating shapeshifter of a film that peeks into a population's historically-induced psychological and possible spiritual landscape through one of humanity's most inherent qualities, the ability to make and tell a story.

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Thai Title: Sang sattawat

In Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), separating the pastoral beauty of a Russian estate and the steely cold interiors of a spacecraft is a lengthy sequence of Kris Kelvin traveling in a car through the highways of an unknown metropolis. The sequence feels obsolete nowadays, Tokyo during the time the film was shot can no longer hold that futuristic illusion Tarkovsky was aiming for.

Syndromes and a Century, part of the New Crowned Hope which celebrates Mozart's 250th Birth Anniversary by commissioning films (including Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Paz Encina's contemplative Paraguayan Hammock (2006)), I believe is Apichatpong Weerasethakul science fiction film, or at least a film wherein he touches on a vision of the future. It's not improbable, Weerasethakul is touching on the discourse between past and present (why limit the discourse between the two junctures of time, when it can be expanded to concern the future).

Nearing the film's end, we get a sequence similar both in use (transition of time) and practicality (the lack of budget or aesthetic considerations in envisioning a Utopian future) wherein hospital machinery and the surroundings are slowly being covered with mist; Weerasethakul's camera lingers and observes in painstaking clarity the seconds and minutes before settling with a shot of a metallic tube sucking the smoke from the room. That difficult puzzle piece segues to an outdoor sequence where people are doing calisthenics in the rhythm of a joyous tune, two Buddhist monks are playing with a remote control-powered UFO and everything is in a state of euphoria. Is this Weerasethakul's vision of the future, wherein hospitals have become obsolete (and diseases too) and the world takes the form of a public park (the same way Tokyo in the 70's is Tarkovsky's vision of the future in Solaris)?

At first glance, Syndromes and a Century feels like it lacks any shape. Absent the two-fold structure (or three-fold if you count the final sequence as one), it's a series of lovely images, conversations and human gestures tied within the bounds of the subject time and space Weerasethakul drafts. Several elements overlap in these shapeless structures of time and space such as the opening job interview between a male doctor discharged from a military base and a female doctor with the latter's insistent lover on standby, or the elderly monk and his offers of healing roots, or the dental appointment between the dentist and a younger monk, or the awkward courtship ritual between the lover and the lady doctor, or the woman who walks with a limp.

The identity feels like the skeleton key to the unsolvable lock of Weerasethakul's logic; but then we are charged with differences that deepens this beautiful puzzle to the point of keeping its viewers in a perpetual motion of admiring its mysteries from a distance. When the admirer confronts the female doctor and asks her to marry him, we are entreated to a tale about the orchid specialist she met and presumably fell in love with, until Weerasethakul abruptly ends the tale to give way to the dentist's blossoming friendship with the young monk, which mysteriously ends with a slight sense of rejection (the dentist follows the monk to his clinic but finds it empty).

These events doesn't seem to have any meaning when juxtaposed with the events of the second half of the film; the new doctor's discovery of the hospital's basement where the soldiers and their family are treated, and also provides secluded room for afternoons of idle chatter and cups of brandy from a half-filled bottle mischievously hidden in a polyester leg. The same doctor's conversation with his girlfriend who asks him to relocate to a seaside industrial site where she will be working in the future, before torridly kissing him and causing him an embarrassing erection (which I presume is the cause of this film's being banned in Thailand), ends that portion, again with a subtle feeling of rejection.

There are also little details that punctuate or enunciate the film's thematic elegance --- the way a group of nurses leaves one who has to tie her shoelaces is quaintly relates to a similar group of male hospital employees who also leaves a member forced to tie his shoelaces; or in that brandy-drinking session wherein Weerasethakul's camera floats to show the faces of the doctors and then settles with an awkward framing where one of the doctors curiously looks straight into the camera; or the casual shots of the perpetuated (by statues and photographs) personalities of the past.

Syndromes and a Century is a film that refuses to be caught or boxed in conventional terms. Despite that, the film conveys so much that it's never difficult to sit through it and taking whatever the film offers you. Even if viewed in a state of daydreaming stupor, you'll still be able to grasp the cleverly mysterious romantic beats of Weerasethakul's film.