Round and round and round they go, the ceiling fans and pond aerators, like the dharmachakra wheel of the Buddha's law. Herself reborn from a previous life she remembers, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) travels back and forth between here and the spirit world, effortlessly. And vice-versa: two goddesses enter the material world from the spirit one to drop by a cafe and chat with Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), one of their devotees, not forgetting to slip in a pitch for a skin cream. People enter a waterside park framed by a mostly stationary camera, where they sit at chairs for a few moments before suddenly getting up and walking out of the picture, their places soon taken by others, as if to hint at the ephemeral and cyclic nature of human existence. The past and the present coexist, and the macro- and microcosms meet as protozoa collide with clouds. Everything is interconnected and inter-affected in the Indra's net of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's cinema.
Sleeping and waking are, of course, another cycle. But in the village of Khon Kaen, this one has been disrupted among soldiers working in a construction project that happens to be sited over the tombs of ancient kings. Keng tells Jen that the souls of these kings have enlisted those of the soldiers in their fight by "sucking up all their energy" (in the Japanese subtitles) and using it to fuel their forces in the underworld battle. Hence the soldiers are left unconscious and in apparent sleep for days on end, sporadically waking for short spells. Hmmm.
Despite the daydream flux (and sometimes somniferous effect) of his cinematography, this and other metaphors sprinkled into the mix by Weerasethakul in "Cemetery of Splendour" (the Thai title translates "Love in Khon Kaen," I'm told) have a wry and topical bite. In one initially baffling scene, the audience at a movie suddenly stand bolt upright and at attention, their eyes glued to the unseen screen. But why? It turns out that it is proper for them to do so when the "Royal Anthem" song extolling the Thai royal family is played (generally before movies) in theaters. But I understand that the anthem and accompanying footage are not allowed to be included within any movies of a merely entertaining nature. Thus we have the strange silence and only the blank faces of the members of the audience reacting to the footage in this, an "entertainment" movie. A little dig.
As the audience leave the theater and ride the escalators down to the exit in a movie complex, we see others riding the up escalators on the opposite sides of the atrium separating them. Shot from the top of the atrium looking straight down, the four banks of escalators form a squarish revolving wheel peopled with moviegoers, spinning round and round, until the giant metallic chakra slowly fades into the hospital room where the soldiers are fast asleep, thereby fusing the two in our minds. Who are the real sleepers? Aren't we all asleep?
In a 2016 interview with the Japanese art magazine "Bitecho," Weerasethakul expressed apprehensions about the course of his country and worries about its people, who he was afraid were "blindly" moving into the future. This statement clearly resonates with the admonition made to Jen toward the film's very end: open your eyes.
I like where Weerasethakul is trying to take us with his cinema, and this intriguing blend of the pointed and the dreamlike would have received a higher rating from this reviewer if only all had come together a bit better.
Sleeping and waking are, of course, another cycle. But in the village of Khon Kaen, this one has been disrupted among soldiers working in a construction project that happens to be sited over the tombs of ancient kings. Keng tells Jen that the souls of these kings have enlisted those of the soldiers in their fight by "sucking up all their energy" (in the Japanese subtitles) and using it to fuel their forces in the underworld battle. Hence the soldiers are left unconscious and in apparent sleep for days on end, sporadically waking for short spells. Hmmm.
Despite the daydream flux (and sometimes somniferous effect) of his cinematography, this and other metaphors sprinkled into the mix by Weerasethakul in "Cemetery of Splendour" (the Thai title translates "Love in Khon Kaen," I'm told) have a wry and topical bite. In one initially baffling scene, the audience at a movie suddenly stand bolt upright and at attention, their eyes glued to the unseen screen. But why? It turns out that it is proper for them to do so when the "Royal Anthem" song extolling the Thai royal family is played (generally before movies) in theaters. But I understand that the anthem and accompanying footage are not allowed to be included within any movies of a merely entertaining nature. Thus we have the strange silence and only the blank faces of the members of the audience reacting to the footage in this, an "entertainment" movie. A little dig.
As the audience leave the theater and ride the escalators down to the exit in a movie complex, we see others riding the up escalators on the opposite sides of the atrium separating them. Shot from the top of the atrium looking straight down, the four banks of escalators form a squarish revolving wheel peopled with moviegoers, spinning round and round, until the giant metallic chakra slowly fades into the hospital room where the soldiers are fast asleep, thereby fusing the two in our minds. Who are the real sleepers? Aren't we all asleep?
In a 2016 interview with the Japanese art magazine "Bitecho," Weerasethakul expressed apprehensions about the course of his country and worries about its people, who he was afraid were "blindly" moving into the future. This statement clearly resonates with the admonition made to Jen toward the film's very end: open your eyes.
I like where Weerasethakul is trying to take us with his cinema, and this intriguing blend of the pointed and the dreamlike would have received a higher rating from this reviewer if only all had come together a bit better.