Movie Review: Mekong Hotel

Mekong Hotel

Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 

Written By: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

 

In some locations, the release of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour is accompanied by his 2012 short (57 minute) Mekong Hotel that was previously unavailable in North America. That wasn’t the case when I saw Cemetery of Splendour at the TIFF Lightbox a few weeks ago, but when I noticed the film has been added to iTunes (in Canada anyway), I figured it was worth the couple bucks and an hour of my time. Unfortunately there isn’t very much to Mekong Hotel – it plays like the director is simply playing around with ideas he has already explored, and will explore again in the future, but in no really meaningful way. The film is confusing – if you watch it with no context, it would be borderline incomprehensible. In short, there is a reason why the film has been mainly unseen since its debut at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival – and why it will likely remain that way. It’s really for diehards only.

 

The film blends together different elements – some documentary (or at least documentary like) footage of Apichatpong Weerasethakul talking to his friend, who is constantly strumming on a guitar (the music is beautiful). Then there is a quiet, slowly evolving love story between two younger people, who like Apichatpong Weerasethakul  and the guitar player, talk about nothing much. The young woman’s mother is also at the title hotel – but she is now a so-called “Pob Ghost” – and spends much of her time gorging on bloody entrails. She can also inhabit the bodies of others, and essentially get them to do the same thing.

 

All of this takes place at the beautiful hotel of the title – on the border of Laos and Thailand, and filmed at a period of flooding. There are many, long, unbroken, mainly silent shots of the flooded areas. These shots are beautiful, and there is no mistaking them for the work of any other director. Also making sure there is no mistaking the director, the supernatural or horror elements are dropped in the film in a completely nonchalant way, and the characters simply except this and move on.

 

Apparently much of the “fictional” elements of the movie are based on an old screenplay that Weerasethakul had written, which he has not had the money to make properly (at least the time, and now he has moved on). This is probably why some of it feels so familiar – while Weerasethakul has always, deliberately repeated themes, motifs and visuals from film to film, this one really does feel like a leftover from Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives – and without that films creativity and inventiveness.

 

In short, Mekong Hotel is more a doodle than anything – the equivalent of a writer’s notebook that contains fragments of ideas that really don’t add up to very much. Is it interesting to see Weerasethakul’s ideas? Sure, a little. But my interest got strained pretty quickly. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a masterful filmmaker – one of the best currently working in the world right now. But perhaps he didn’t really need to share this with the public. Diehards, knock yourself out. The rest of you can skip it, and focus on Cemetery of Splendour and his other features.

Movie Review: Cemetery of Splendour

Cemetery of Splendour

Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul   

Written by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Starring: Jenjira Pongpas (Jenjira), Banlop Lomnoi (Itt), Jarinpattra Rueangram (Keng), Petcharat Chaiburi (Nurse Tet), Tawatchai Buawat (The Mediator), Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw (Goddess 1), Bhattaratorn Senkraigul (Goddess 2), Sakda Kaewbuadee (Teng), Richard Abramson (Richard Widner).

 

About half way into Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas) is praying at a shrine, giving offerings of small, carved animals to a pair of goddess, and explaining what they are for to her American husband, Richard. One is for her leg – she has one that is significantly shorter than the other, and she needs to walk with braces. One is for his hand. And the other is for their “new son” – Itt (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a soldier in a deep sleep at the former school transformed into a hospital Jenjira volunteers at. “We have a new son?” Richard asks, amused. “Yes, he was a soldier. You’re a foreigner, you wouldn’t understand”, she informs him. He insists that he does – but I’m not sure he really does.

 

I highlight this exchange, because I think to a certain extent, it describes the movie as well. Whenever I watch one of Weerasethakul’s film, I am always aware there is a level of political allegory going on beneath the surface of the film that I never fully understand. Weerasethakul is a Thai filmmaker, and even if his movies don’t make a ton of money at home, he is making them for a Thai audience, who is going to understand them in a different way than I, as an outsider, will. And yet, it is because Weerasethakul’s films are so specific that the emotions they conjure up are universal. When a film tries to dodge the specifics – like say, Beasts of No Nation, which took place in an unnamed African country, and danced around the root of the conflict – it starts to feel at least slightly false. I may not understand the exact political climate in Thailand that Weerasethakul is commenting on in his films – but on a more human level, the films work.

 

As with Weerasethakul’s other films, the past haunts the present in Cemetery of Splendour. The main story takes place at a rural school that has been transformed into a hospital. An old classroom, has been turned into a warding for the sleeping soldiers, whose families loyally visit them, although they mostly remain unconscious. What caused the soldiers to fall asleep in the first place is never explained, although it explained that the school was built on the “Cemetery of Kings”, and these long dead man are using the unconscious men to continue to fight their war for them, sapping their energy, and keeping them that way. Each man is hooked up to a glowing machine – the Americans apparently used these in Afghanistan as well – that is supposed to regulate their dreams. It is here where Jenjira meets Itt – he has no family to visit him, so she is the one who keeps vigil. Occasionally, Itt wakes up, and he and Jenjira hit the town – they go out for noodles, or to the movies. But he could fall asleep again at any minute. There is a physic, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a young woman who can communicate with the dead – or in this case, the unconscious. The most memorable sequence of the movie is when Keng and Jenjira walk around the grounds outside of the hospital. Keng has been taken over by Itt for this sequence, and he/she describes the ornate palace of the King that he sees, as Jenjira (and us, in the audience), she the normal forest all around us.

 

Weerasethakul is a very deliberate filmmaker – which is a nice way of saying that his films are often slow. Even compared to the likes of Syndromes and a Century and Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Cemetery of Splendour is languidly paced. Those two films have a lot in common with this one – Syndromes was also set at a hospital, and Weerasethakul repeats some of the imagery of that film (although not the literal inner workings of the hospital building he had there). I think near the end, Weerasethakul is even playing with the audience a little – making us think he’s going to end the film the way he did that time – before circling around and ending the film with a rare close-up – which is all the more stunning because it is so rare. With Uncle Boonme, it shares the matter of fact presentation of the supernatural – ghosts are taken as a given in these films, not horror movie stuff, but something more quiet and powerful.

 

Weerasethakul is a one of a kind filmmaker – marching to the beat of his own drummer. His camera rarely moves, and he prefers long takes – sometimes they stretch on for minutes on end. His films also defy easy interpretation. He doesn’t do the work for the audience – but he allows them to figure it all out for themselves. Some of Cemetery of Splendour baffles me, some of it delights me, some of it haunts me, and yes, some of it bores me. I think it’s fair to say that Cemetery of Splendour is a more interesting film to write and talk about than it is to actually watch. It certainly is a film that I’m glad I saw, and will not soon forget – even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of some of Weerasethakul’s previous films.

The Best Movies I Have Never Seen Before: Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Syndromes and a Century (2006) ****
Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Written by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Starring: Arkanae Cherkam (Ple), Jaruchai Iamaram (Dr. Nohng), Sakda Kaewbuadee (Sakda), Sin Kaewpakpin (Old Monk), Nu Nimsomboon (Toa), Jenjira Pongpas (Pa Jane), Sophon Pukanok (Noom), Nantarat Sawaddikul (Dr. Tei), Wanna Wattanajinda (Dr. Wan).

The more films I see by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the more in love with them I become. I had somehow avoided his films for a decade, before seeing his strange, haunting Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year. Entering that film new to Weersethakul I was both enthralled by the film and confused by it. Going back and watching his previous films – first Tropical Malady and now Syndromes and a Century (2006), I find it easier to get on Weersethakul’s rhythm (I look forward to seeing his breakthrough film, 2002’s Blissfully Yours at my earliest convenience). I could say that Syndromes and a Century is my favorite of his films so far, but perhaps that’s just because it’s easier for me to accept his films now for what they are – odes to romantic longing and innocent eroticism where the past, present and future all collide in films that operate on a dreamlike logic.

Syndromes and a Century, like Tropical Malady before it, is really split into two different films, although each half informs the other. We start at a rural hospital set some 40 years in the past, where a female doctor interviews the most recent addition to the staff. Some of the questions are related to medicine, and some seem to be completely out of the blue “Do you like squares or circles? What color would you want the circle to be?” etc). Then as these two doctors walk out of her office and down the corridor, the camera pans away from them and looks out the window longing – at a beautiful forest and a lovely little house. The doctors and their conversation remain on the soundtrack, but are rendered unimportant by Weersethakul’s daring camera move.

It may help to know that Weersethakul sees this as a movie about his parents, who were both doctors. But then again, it very well may not, because the plot, as much as there is one, isn’t really about these two doctors falling in love. In fact, they don’t fall in love at all. Another man is in love with the female doctor we see at the beginning of the film, and in a scene where he confesses his love for her, she instead of accepting it, tells him the story of the man she once loved – an orchid salesman, who was in love with someone else. There is also a delicate story between a dentist and a young monk, who bond over their love of music. Yet in a scene where we sense these two circling each other, in the same gentle, innocent eroticism on display in the first half of Tropical Malady, the dentist admits he thinks that the monk is his reincarnated brother.

The second half repeats much of what happened in the films first half – yet this time in a modern, urban hospital. We open with the same interview between the female and male doctor, but this time the questions and answers are slightly different – the camera holds her in its gaze, instead of him, which is odd considering while the first half mainly followed her after the interview, this second half mainly follows him. Once again these two characters don’t get together, and instead we see the male doctor with his photographer girlfriend.

The two halves of the movie tell a similar story, but highlights the difference between the time and place in which they take place. The innocent story of unrequited love and gentle longing, set in a beautiful area where Weersethakul concentrates on the nature around the hospital, is replaced by something slightly courser in the second half (and erection makes an appearance in the second half of the film, but notably not the first). People are not connecting to the same degree in the second half. Instead of shots of the beauty of nature, Weersethakul shows us the duct work of the hospital.

But, as with all films by Weersethakul, just when I think I have it all figured out, he pulls the rug out from underneath us. What are we are to make of how he chooses to end his film, which is a large outdoor aerobics routine led by an enthusiastic instructor and then gradually pulling the camera back to see hundreds of people following along? It is a mystery to which I don’t think I’ll ever find the answer to.

But, in the end, it is that mystery that makes Weersethakul’s films so mesmerizing. These films are deliberately paced, with camera shots lasting minutes on end, slow pans and close-ups. In them, Weersethakul explores the mysteries of human nature, love, desire, lust and so much more. It is what makes him one of the most original filmmakers working in movies today.

The Best Movies I've Never Seen Before: Tropical Malady (2004)

Tropical Malady (2004) ****
Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Written by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Starring: Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Huai Dessom, Sirivech Jareonchon, Udom Promma.

I think critics who say that the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who I will refer to as Joe for the rest of this review, because that is what he likes English people to call him, undoubtedly because he is tired of having to explain how to pronounce his name) are difficult to understand quite simply are trying too hard to make sense of them. In my review of his latest film, the Palme D’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (which is the first of his films I had seen), I admitted I wasn’t sure if I understood it all, but loved it regardless. Looking back on it, I think I did understand the film. It is about precisely what it seems to be about.

The same can be said for his 2004 film, Tropical Malady, which many critics said was inscrutable, but I just think they’re trying too hard. The film contains a rupture at its midpoint – going from one story to a radically different one half way through, and yet both are essentially the same story, told in radically different styles. The two films, if you prefer, that make up Tropical Malady deepen the understanding of each other.

The first film is about a solider Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) and his romantic relationship with innocent country boy Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). This is a chaste love story, between two sickly sweet characters, who talk to each other in romantic clichés that are meant, I think, to be funny. That the dialogue is corny in the extreme is precisely the point – these two are in an old fashioned romance, in which sex seems to be the last thing on their mind. Instead they like to proclaim their love to each other like teenagers who barely understand the concept of love in the first place. It is the last scene in this film – where first Keng licks Tong’s fingers, and then Tong does the same, before smiling and walking off into the distance without a word, in which lust first shows itself – and it’s this scene that in effect causes the rupture in the film, and gives way to the fever dream that is the second half.

That second half starts with Keng, a soldier once more, waking up and finding out that another cow in the small village in which he has been stationed (presumably alone, since we see no other soldiers) has been taken, and that the villagers are blaming it on a mythical “Tiger Ghost”. Keng goes off into the jungle in search of this Tiger Ghost, and gets some strange help along the way – from a talking baboon (Joe loves talking monkeys), and a translucent cow). It shouldn’t surprise you to find that the Tiger Ghost, when Keng finally does track it down, turns out to be Tong.

The first half of the movie, with its chaste romance, is shot is duller colors – at least after the opening sequence when we see Keng, and his fellow soldiers, standing around a body on the outskirts of a jungle, snapping pictures of each other smiling. Their romance, with all its simplicity, is told in realistic fashion. The second half is full of bright colors – as if the dream world is more vivid than reality, which in the case of Joe’s films is certainly the case. His films operate on dream logic, not on realistic logic, which I think could explain why some have such a hard time liking his films.

Tropical Malady is a fascinating movie – one that, especially in the second half, plays like a dream that you cannot get out of your head. If in the first half love remains just out of reach for Keng. Both of these characters are being pursued by each other – meaning they are also pursuing each other – and yet the impression is that neither one can actually catch the other. They remain out of reach. The second half once again sees the two characters – now the soldier and the tiger ghost – pursuing each other. Once again it appears like this is where the characters belong – with each other – but that it may not be possible. The film is about man’s relationship with nature, and also about release through death. The film’s two halves illustrate a similar point – one in reality, one in the dream world.

I don’t expect that there are many people who want to see Joe’s films. They are not simple, yet they are not as complicated as people make them seem. People like to impose a classical structure to films – want films that are both complex and yet easy to understand. They want a films mysteries to be solved for them by the end of the film, because to a certain extent, it is more comforting that way. Joe doesn’t make films like that. You have to do work when you watch one of his films. And yet, I cannot help but think that he puts everything you need to know right there on the screen – in bright, beautiful colors – for all to see. You need to spend less time trying to figure it all out, and simply let his films wash over you.

Movie Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ****
Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Written By: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Starring: Thanapat Saisaymar (Boonmee), Sakda Kaewbuadee (Tong), Jenjira Pongpas (Jen).

Whether the Cannes jury led by Tim Burton meant to or not, by giving Apichatpong Weerasethakul the Palme D’Or – the most prestigious prize in the film world – this year has made his film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a film that has inspired fevered debate. On one side, you have people like Peter Howell, who in the wake of the victory noted that it was a ridiculous choice – that this art film would die a quick death in a few art house theaters and then be forgotten forever and that the film didn’t deserve comparison to such films as La Dolce Vita, Apocalypse Now or Kagemusha – three films that one the same prize in years past. On the other side, were people and publications like Cinemascope who proclaimed this the most important decision a Cannes jury has ever made – said that it may just be the greatest film to ever win the Palme – and how this was a strike back for art film lovers, and people like Howell are completely out to lunch and doesn’t understand films like this or what they mean. A debate like this is unfair to the film itself – which is a great film, but one where I can’t help but think that Howell may be right about. This is never going to be an audience pleasing film, nor does it have to be. The film is no greater nor no worse than it would have been regardless as to whether it won the Palme D’Or, or got ignored by the jury. The film has to ultimately succeed or fail based on what is one screen.

For me, what was onscreen was hypnotic, beautiful and entrancing. I have often that many viewers are intimidated by so called art films by thinking that they may not understand them – which has always struck me as ridiculous because for the most part, they are very simple films. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is no exception. It is about precisely what you think it is about – an old farmer named Boonmee who is slowly dying of liver disease. He sister in law and nephew come to visit him in his final days, where he remains in surprisingly good spirits. At dinner one night, they are joined by the ghost of Boonmee’s wife, and later by the soon they had together who has disappeared. He has come back – but not strictly as himself, but as a Monkey Ghost with glowing red eyes (there are a lot of them in the film, making for some of the most striking visuals the film has to offer). He has transformed into this Monkey Ghost because he has mated with one. This, in a way, is Boonmee recalling his past life – not one before this life, but just earlier in this life. There is another striking scene involving a princess who is only beautiful when she looks into a specific pool of water. She goes there often, and on this occasion she speaks to a catfish. Is this a past life, a dream, does it matter?

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives does not really adhere strictly to the rules of narrative filmmaking, but rather to dream logic. All of what we see could be real or could be a dream and you could drive yourself crazy trying to identify precisely what is real, and what isn’t – but it doesn’t really matter does it? What matters is the visuals in a film like this, and they are haunting and provocative. Apichatpong has made a film where each segment has a different visual scheme and look – the film is as much a tribute to cinema as anything else – and amazingly they all fit together. Lest you think that this is purely a visual exercise, let me assure you it isn’t. It is about Boonmee who is dying and worries about his past sins – specifically that he killed too many communists, which could be represented in all the mosquitoes who buzz around him annoying him to no end, and not letting him get any real peace.

The final segment of the film is the hardest one, at least to be, to reconcile as it takes place after Boonmee has died, and focuses on his remaining family – his sister in law, her daughter (who we had not seen up to this point) and the nephew who has also visited him and has now become a monk. He visits his family, showers and changes out of his robes. As they are about to leave the apartment for dinner, he notices that while he is talking to his aunt, there is another version of her, and himself, just sitting there watching TV. I think what is going on is that Apichatapong is showing us how there are different versions of ourselves – we are essentially different people throughout our lives – but perhaps I don’t know.

I don’t really care that I may not fully understand Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I don’t necessarily think it is important to enjoying the film – or at least being entranced by it. I like it when a film challenges you to try and decipher its meanings – even when you know that may never be able to figure it all out. I also know, however, that I am in the minority of filmgoers who feel that way. If you want narrative cohesion – a film that proceeds logically from point A to B to C and spells everything out for you than this isn’t the film for you – like Peter Howell, you will simply grow frustrated with it. But if you are adventuresome – willing to open yourself up to something different than you normally see than Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a must see. I just can’t guarantee you’ll understand it all – I didn’t, but still loved it.