Cemetery of Splendour

In Thailand, an elementary school has been turned into a clinic to care for soldiers suffering from a mysterious sudden sleeping sickness. Jenjira is a housewife volunteer at the clinic. She takes more interest in one particular patient Itt. Whenever he wakes, she befriends him. Others claim the school was built on an ancient Royal cemetery and the soldier's energy are being drained to fight battles in the other world. Jenjira befriends medium Keng who claims to be able to be possessed by the comatose men.

The camera style is very static. The camera is set up in one position and the scene unfolds without any edits. These scenes last as long as a minute or two. It has a hypnotic feel at first but it does get boring after awhile. The central mystery keeps one's interest but it gets more and more perplexing. It becomes an exercise in surreal storytelling. There are some head-scratching things going on and sometimes I wonder if they are dreams. Also why are they digging up the field? It would be more compelling if the visuals could be more surreal. They need to be more imaginative and crazier. The movie needs to explain better or be completely inexplicable.

A truly meditative experience sure to leave you helplessly vulnerable into succumbing to eternal slumber as the soldiers in this film. That's a blessing and a curse for Cemetery of Splendor. But visually, this is a work of art. The colors light up the screen majestically. Everyone and everything in this film seems to be shifting in and out of a deep sleep. This is cinema in a catatonic state.

Cemetery of Splendour is a serene and mystical meditation on spiritual connection and dreaming. But Weerasethakul's first feature since 'Uncle Boonmee' will not be for everyone - it will either send you into deep spiritual contemplation, or send you to sleep.

The setting is a makeshift hospice in Thailand for soldiers with Narcalepsy; a sleeping condition in which patients are almost always asleep. Jen, a middle-aged woman with a physical impairment, is assigned to look after one of the soldiers as a volunteer. She rubs cream into his muscles, and takes him out for meals when he is awake. But beneath the ebb and flow of life at the hospice, there are other spiritual forces at play; talk of an ancient cemetery, and the spirits of kings and goddesses.

The film is shot beautifully. The camera stays fixed in wide angle - each scene being a window through which the characters enter and connect, reminiscent of the work of Bela Tarr. I think the camera moved twice the entire film.

Cemetery of Splendour is most definitely a slow burner. I'd go as far as to say that it doesn't really reach any heights of dramatic or narrative tension. The film is much more of an experiential, moody piece that lingers and floats like light sleep. I didn't quite understand it, and I almost fell asleep, but if the film is exploring Narcolepsy, then I think that's the point...

Cemetery of Splendour is a magical realism tale, that doesn't ask or answer any questions, but lets the viewer ask them for himself while watching.

It is slow paced and leaves a lot to imagination, so you will have to actively watch it, instead of just letting it play in the background.

Every moment of this film is enjoyable. For much of the movie, it struck me as no more or less than a solid example of the cinema of auteur Arichitapong Weerasthakul. He is, perhaps, the most sincerely and successfully magical-realist artist that cinema has known. The social rhythms seem utterly naturalistic, even when the main character, an old, recently handicapped hospital worker, is having a pleasant chat with ancient deities. As with early Peter Weir, Weerasthakul's natural landscapes are utterly, well, natural yet they seem to suggest a haunting, an otherworldly force that's face is the world, one which may or may not be benevolent. History, for Weerasthakul, is the haunting of the present and future by past lives and past worlds, spectral- beings that traverse and are traversed by the present.

During Cemetery's last scenes I came to think this may be Weerasthakul's most fully realized work. The penultimate shot is extraordinary. The main character stares out at a central square of the village where the film has taken place, which the current government is digging up, presumably to make way for some "modern convenience". Children play over the new ruins like spirits of the future levitating over a present fading into the past. Our lives, our worlds, can only exist atop the ruins and amid the ghosts of the past. Destruction is therefore creation. But that doesn't make destruction, perhaps especially in its contemporary, mechanized form, any less terrifying.