Sang sattawat

Funded by the city of Vienna as part of the celebration marking the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, Syndromes and a Century by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady), is a visionary masterpiece that blurs the boundaries of past and present and, like the plays of Harold Pinter, explores the subjectivity of memory. It is an abstract but a very warm and often very funny film about the director's recollections of his parents, both doctors, before they fell in love. According to Apichatpong, however, it is not about biography but about emotion. "It's a film about heart", he says, "about feelings that have been forever etched in the heart." Structured in two parts similar to Tropical Malady, the opening sequence takes place in a rural hospital surrounded by lush vegetation. A woman doctor, Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul) interviews Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram), an ex-army medic who wants to work in the hospital, the two characters reflecting the director's parents. The questions, quite playfully, are not only about his knowledge and experience but also about his hobbies, his pets, and whether he prefers circles, squares or triangles. When asked what DDT (Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) stands for, he replies, "Destroy Dirty Things".

Like the fragmented recollection of a dream, the film is composed of snippets of memory that start suddenly then end abruptly without resolution. A dentist wants to become a singer and takes an interest in one of his patients, a Buddhist monk whose dream is to become a disc jockey. A fellow doctor awkwardly proclaims his desperate love for Dr. Toey who relates to him a story about an infatuation that she had with an orchid expert who invited her to his farm. A woman doctor hides a pint of liquor inside a prosthetic limb. A monk tells the doctor of some bad dreams he has been having about chickens. A young patient with carbon monoxide poisoning bats tennis balls down a long hospital corridor.

Syndromes and a Century does not yield to immediate deciphering as it moves swiftly from the real to the surreal and back again. Halfway through the film, the same characters repeat the opening sequence but this time it is in a modern high-tech facility and the mood is changed as well as the camera focus. The second variation is less intimate than the first, but there are no overarching judgments about past or present, rural or urban, ancient or modern. Things are exactly the way that they are and the way they are not, and we are left to embrace it all. Towards the end, a funnel inhales smoke for several minutes as if memories are being sucked into a vortex to be stored forever or forgotten. Like this serenely magical film, it casts a spell that is both hypnotic and enigmatic.

There is a story to be found here somewhere, but it is cleverly hidden among a grab bag of images. Ostensibly it is about the director's parents who were both doctors. But they are on screen for about 10% of the movie.

Director Weerasethakul uses skillful framing and subtle color to create some remarkable images. There are some very sensual scenes of natural settings. The majority of scenes seem to be thrown in due to random firings in the director's brain. There are long slow takes circling statues that come from nowhere and go nowhere and lots of prolonged shots of people staring into space. There is one scene capturing a perfectly ordinary dental procedure that goes on for several minutes and another scene of great length of an exhaust vent sucking smoke out of a room. This latter is somewhat transfixing, but I can't see why it's there.

The movie creates a mood, but I often found that mood to be one of annoyance. If anyone can explain the meaning of the English title ("Syndromes and a Century") please let me know.

This one is definitely for the art house crowd.

While the experiments with memory and non-sequential progress through the film are interesting, my final reaction was so what.

What was Weerasethakul trying to achieve that Resnais had already done far better in L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The formalisms explored through the retelling of stories at a different time and place were intriguing but there were none of the power of the imagery of Marienbad. Images from Marianbad live with me 30+ years later. These ones won't and not only because I'll be dead by then.

It was two hours on the edge of tedium, but the skill was you stayed on the edge not fell into ennui. But I had no sense when I left the cinema that I had had a true aesthetic experience or provided me with images to refract new experiences through.

Maybe hotels do more for me than hospitals, I don't know.

Here there is no story, no beginning or end. Snippets only of the universal experience of memory and feeling. So banal, so beautiful, the camera looks - often from a distance almost in reverie, at the smallest things in our lives. The camera is in fact a detached "third eye" - seeing what we don't focus on, remembering what we have forgotten. The actors (are they actors?) play out their small parts with humor, grace and and sincere naturalism.

One of a handful of directors using the unique language of film to its fullest doing what no other medium can do.

Touching, funny, hypnotic, complex and simple - Weerasethakul's signature is all over this film - his humanity, his recognition that the unexplainable is present in every ordinary life, that everything is worthy of our attention ...

If only this dream sequence of a film came with a frame, a few moments of lucid guidance. A narrator, even for a brief opening and perhaps an explanatory note on the shift from rural Thailand to urban?

Without a background prep course, we are left wandering.

We are told by reviewers that this is a film about "Joe's" parents, his memories. Oh? Where? Not in the film. Not unless some lengthy Thai passage wasn't translated.

Please, Apichatpong, just a hint and the help of structure. It wouldn't have harmed the feel, the mood, the effect, in any way.

Are the two contrasting sections of the film, rural to urban, concurrent or a gap in time?

Some scenes, disassociated as they may be, are marvelous. The industrial process room, with a snakelike suction tube that would have done Dali proud. The steam, the fumes, whatever the smoky substance, swirling amid the machinery, I could smell the metal in the air.

We are also told by other reviewers that it's one of the Four Best films of the past decade in one poll and THE best in a poll of critics associated with the prestigious Toronto Film Festival.

Really? You can't be serious.

What it truly is? A film of beauty, of quiet, of sly humor, reflection, and a soundtrack of subdued accompaniment that seems to invite introspection in the viewer.

That's not all that bad, if you ask me. But we need a Sherpa beyond the simple edits.

If you do some research you'll find that the film was prohibited from exhibition in Thailand. Four scenes the censors thought objectionable, including a long, yet somewhat passive kiss and the sight of a monk playing guitar.

Strange, these moral critiques coming from country that for decades allowed its capital to become the brothel of the world.

I fear some of the reviews are thus political. And certainly I can't support censorship. But let's get a grip on the difference between support for the filmmaker and sainthood.