Director/writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Music: Kantee Anantagant
Editor: Lee Chatametikool
Cast: Nantarat Sawaddikul, Jaruchai Iamaram, Arkanae Cherkam, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jenjira Pongpas, Nu Nimsomboon, Sin Kaewpakpin
As a class, film critics seem inclined to line up and laud the movies of Thai director and writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul—this is the fourth of his pictures I’ve had occasion to write about by way of surveying the critical roundups at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). Weerasethakul is a little bit Lynchy and a whole bunch Kubricky and don’t forget Antonioni. He likes to look at things. He’s Western in many ways and Asian in many others—practical, humorous, spiritual, inscrutable. Mostly his movies are quite beautiful—credit to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Weerasethakul’s long-time collaborator—mostly they are slow, and mostly they are baffling. Syndromes and a Century, for example, appears to crack in half at the midpoint and go some other direction from the first half.
But it’s not really exactly so. Reading a synopsis helped me clarify that it’s more like a restart at the halfway point and pursuing other directions. It’s more a kind of memoir piece for Weerasethakul, presenting fragments of the lives of his parents, who were both doctors, amid sensory memories of his childhood. This simple explanation more or less put everything in order for me and, where I had been dreading looking at it again (I couldn’t make much of it the first time several years ago), I found it much more palatable and enjoyable this time. (Later I found that I might be entirely mistaken about what I saw.) Weerasethakul’s approach to narrative remains eccentric and opaque but that is offset somewhat by his pervasive, gentle humor. The result was one of my best times with his stuff.
As a class, film critics seem inclined to line up and laud the movies of Thai director and writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul—this is the fourth of his pictures I’ve had occasion to write about by way of surveying the critical roundups at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). Weerasethakul is a little bit Lynchy and a whole bunch Kubricky and don’t forget Antonioni. He likes to look at things. He’s Western in many ways and Asian in many others—practical, humorous, spiritual, inscrutable. Mostly his movies are quite beautiful—credit to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Weerasethakul’s long-time collaborator—mostly they are slow, and mostly they are baffling. Syndromes and a Century, for example, appears to crack in half at the midpoint and go some other direction from the first half.
But it’s not really exactly so. Reading a synopsis helped me clarify that it’s more like a restart at the halfway point and pursuing other directions. It’s more a kind of memoir piece for Weerasethakul, presenting fragments of the lives of his parents, who were both doctors, amid sensory memories of his childhood. This simple explanation more or less put everything in order for me and, where I had been dreading looking at it again (I couldn’t make much of it the first time several years ago), I found it much more palatable and enjoyable this time. (Later I found that I might be entirely mistaken about what I saw.) Weerasethakul’s approach to narrative remains eccentric and opaque but that is offset somewhat by his pervasive, gentle humor. The result was one of my best times with his stuff.
At about 54:00 the movie repeats an interview we saw at the beginning of the picture, but it’s a little different, from another point of view, and with more detail. In fact, many of the early scenes are replicated or directly referenced at this point. But hold up, I’m getting word now from the internet that this represents a break of 40 years? As far as I could tell none of the players had aged and the setting didn’t seem radically modernized, but there you have it. The more you try to get it right and pin down understanding with Weerasethakul’s pictures, perhaps, the more confounding they are. I seem to enjoy them most when I’m not trying to figure them out (or think I have figured them out). But I liked this second look at Syndromes and a Century as much as anything I’ve ever seen by him, and no matter how much I missed. Or “missed.”
I mean, I like narrative coherence as much as the next guy, and in a general way, especially in movies that eschew it, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being trapped looking for it. I also try, as a general rule, to know as little about a movie as I can going in to watching it. That might be my mistake, and yet I feel movies and novels too really should contain everything you need to know within them, to a reasonable degree. A novel isn’t going to teach you how to read, for example. But sometimes you have go to the wild internet, look to Wikipedia, IMDb, Google, and other more reputable sources to get information a creator may not be willing to give up within the four corners of the work.
I was better able to put together (or not), with help from these random supplementary materials, that much of Syndromes and a Century is told from the point of view of a young child. We have to put it together because we never really see any conventional POV representation of a particular young child. We just get fragments. So we see many monks in saffron robes obtaining services at a hospital complex with many healthcare professionals. One of the monks is getting a dental checkup. He tells the dentist he wanted to be a DJ before he became a monk. The dentist tells him he wants to be a singer and spends the rest of the appointment singing to the monk as he works on him. It's annoying but the humor sneaks up. The timing in this scene is all comic.
Later we see the dentist singing in a kind of lounge setting—I didn’t recognize him at first—and somehow it is not cheesy or camp at all, but a little bewitching. In another awkward scene with the monk, this time not in the dentist’s office, he confesses that he blames himself for his brother’s death when they were children. He asks the monk to get in touch with him for him and convey his apologies. It’s funny and tender and cringy all at once. We see sideline views, never direct, of a burgeoning love relationship between two doctors, maybe. We get a solar eclipse, most likely special effects but nonetheless bold and spellbinding. We meet an orchid merchant with a unique plant he claims is phosphorescent. The soundtrack, when it plays, is often almost not audible, wisps of electronic ambient strains on the air. And the picture finishes gloriously on teens dancing to pop music on an asphalt playground.
I mean, I like narrative coherence as much as the next guy, and in a general way, especially in movies that eschew it, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being trapped looking for it. I also try, as a general rule, to know as little about a movie as I can going in to watching it. That might be my mistake, and yet I feel movies and novels too really should contain everything you need to know within them, to a reasonable degree. A novel isn’t going to teach you how to read, for example. But sometimes you have go to the wild internet, look to Wikipedia, IMDb, Google, and other more reputable sources to get information a creator may not be willing to give up within the four corners of the work.
I was better able to put together (or not), with help from these random supplementary materials, that much of Syndromes and a Century is told from the point of view of a young child. We have to put it together because we never really see any conventional POV representation of a particular young child. We just get fragments. So we see many monks in saffron robes obtaining services at a hospital complex with many healthcare professionals. One of the monks is getting a dental checkup. He tells the dentist he wanted to be a DJ before he became a monk. The dentist tells him he wants to be a singer and spends the rest of the appointment singing to the monk as he works on him. It's annoying but the humor sneaks up. The timing in this scene is all comic.
Later we see the dentist singing in a kind of lounge setting—I didn’t recognize him at first—and somehow it is not cheesy or camp at all, but a little bewitching. In another awkward scene with the monk, this time not in the dentist’s office, he confesses that he blames himself for his brother’s death when they were children. He asks the monk to get in touch with him for him and convey his apologies. It’s funny and tender and cringy all at once. We see sideline views, never direct, of a burgeoning love relationship between two doctors, maybe. We get a solar eclipse, most likely special effects but nonetheless bold and spellbinding. We meet an orchid merchant with a unique plant he claims is phosphorescent. The soundtrack, when it plays, is often almost not audible, wisps of electronic ambient strains on the air. And the picture finishes gloriously on teens dancing to pop music on an asphalt playground.
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