Syndromes and a Century

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.

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.

I have now seen three of Apichatpong's films (Mysterious Objects, Blissfully Yours and now this). It finally occurred to me what is going on and why so many people, already enamored of offbeat, experimental and artsy films, still find his work difficult.

I really got into "Mysterious Objects" at first, the "exquisite corpse" method and the way a simple story got embellished as he went along. But Apichatpong seemed to lose interest in the narrative, so the film became a static slide show of his travels, losing all of its narrative energy.

"Sud Saneha" (Blissfully Yours) never got me engaged. It was an agonizing experience in lost opportunity and self-indulgent amateurism.

So now, I can say that "Syndromes and a Century" is by far the best of the three. I gave it 6 out of 10.

I finally understood that Apichatpong is an artist of still images. He has no idea what to do with emotions or the people who feel them. He just allows them to populate his canvas, and pays no attention to what they do. In fact, if they do nothing and stay still, that's even better.

The camera moves from time to time, but that is clearly just giving better depth to his still images. He has no skills in using images that move, other than to take them in in a decidedly passive way. There are times in this movie when it is effective (the steam entering the pipe, for example), but most of the time, it underscores his discomfort with the moving image.

I really want to like his films, mostly because here in Thailand, popular culture is so crushing and stifling, anything artistic is like drops of water in a desert. But I can only cut so much slack.

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.

Vague talk of art nine times out of ten will miss the whole point. Critics will enumerate a few themes, but that is repeating words, knowing one word instead of ten things. The main thing is that here we have a filmmaker who knows what it all is out there, or better said: knows how to sculpt currents of life with a clarity that is neither misty-eyed nor cynical, that is both unwavering gaze of the present and mental awareness of broader cycles. Let's see what is all that.

The film is split in two halves, both centered around a hospital with recurring characters coming and going. The first half is an idyllic countryside reverie with lush tropical foliage looming outside the hospital windows; it is a love song wafting through the quiet summer night, the sound of crickets carried by the breeze, stories of climbing mango trees and reincarnation, sunlight over green pastures. Inside this part there is another story of denied love but look how gentle the emotional handling; it ends with laughter, with no one needlessly wounded or wallowing in misery, with no judgement and no one's soul exposed except a tiny corner tenderly to us.

So the first part is unspooling some lovely mood, simple so you may not think much of the film at this point.

Except we have a second part, again in a hospital, repeats the opening shot of the film but now the pov has been reversed—with us 'looking back' at what was being looked at in the first scene. There are several shifts in this second part. Some obvious ones, in time and mood, the hospital now is modern, the mood is sterile, the jungle out the window is now the concrete boom of the big city. A little less obviously: we now miss the rustic gift of wrapped crispy pork, the small talk of musical dreams with the dentist, no one tells stories about mango trees or reincarnation anymore. There is no love song. Traffic instead of crickets.

To emphasize this bizarre new landscape of life, there is a sequence starting with when we see a legless man crouching on the floor, a bizarre sight intentionally shot this way to jar. People are being fitted with artificial limbs in the basement, and the imagery though now it makes sense is still depressing by contrast to earlier. Now there's carbon monoxide poisoning.

However, other things have not changed. The stone statue of the sitting Buddha is in the same place. The old Buddhist monk still has funny dreams with chicken, still swaps medical advice for herbs that supposedly sooth confused mind. You may appreciate that his memory is better now.

The best part is at the level of perception of things. Until the second segment with the drastic shift ahead, we don't know all that tropical bliss and boredom is going to be in the past. Suddenly we have memories of a past life, colored as more pure because we recall it as more pure. It is a bit of a mystery just how this has happened, in physical terms, how the two worlds fit together, which is for the better; this is not to be reasoned with, the insight is of emotional intellect.

By this I mean a specific thing, a shift in watching. Now the first part seems more pure, the modern second part more depressing which makes the contrast a little mawkish and the film slightly contrived. But that is in large part in the eye.

If you look closer, in the present segment people are no more sullen or hurried, as we'd think normal to show in modern life, than at first. The surrounding world has changed of course, and that does affect the experience of living. Whereas there used to be clean riverwater to bathe one's broken parts in, now the old woman has to conjure the cleansing illusion of healing water. Isn't cinema nothing but a cleansing illusion? It can only have as much effect, as much depth as you let it.

This scene is key. Faced with the old crone, the boy does what? Walks away suspicious of the healing effect. Next to traffic and carbon monoxide poisoning, now there is cynicism. So if you, similarly, turn your back on the healing promise of the film and walk away with just an artful assertion of the effects of modernization, you miss the whole reason behind this.

It all ends with two unforgettable shots of this cinematic healing illusion in actual effect; everything sucked into the roaring void but that is not the end, the parting shot of public gymnastics in a park shows a renewal and zest for it all to start again, an absolutely marvelous moment.

So we've had some expansion of our awareness in the first part because of the freeflow and not knowing where it goes, colored by memory in the second part and contraction as the mind points out logical contrasts between past and present, setting limits to vision because suddenly we define the present by what it's not, the 'purer' past.

Now emptying ourselves of all that in the first of the two shots (samadhi), this last shot rings loud and clear, restoring the world to broader dimensions. It is one of the most transcendent moments in film, equal to the dance scene of another Asian film, Sharasojyu.

In both cases it is not the shot itself, it is the placement, opening our eyes to it after all we've seen. There are no words, no conventional wisdom for the mind to latch onto except breathing in the air of that one exuberant moment of people.

This is what the Buddhist know and cultivate in meditation as prajna or intuitive wisdom, understanding the one root beneath the myriad branches of illusion.

Something to meditate upon.