What I most want from an art movie is to be taken to somewhere else. Another part of the world, yes, but also taken to another way of seeing. Cemetery Of Splendour (2015; Rak Ti Khon Kaen) is only my second film that I’ve watched from Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul (after Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), but it was perfect viewing on a day when I was home, recovering from feeling sick, wrapped up in a blanket on the couch. Shot in Weerasethakul’s home town of Khon Kaen, it follows a middle aged woman, Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas) who volunteers at a make-shift hospital established in a building that used to be her childhood school. In the hospital are discharged soldiers stuck in a condition of constant sleep. There’s a mystery as to why they cannot wake up and even further wonders around the light therapy equipment brought in to supposedly provide the soldiers good dreams while they sleep – technology represented by glowing light tubes that change colour next to their beds. As Jenjira tends to a soldier without any visiting family, Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), and starts to talk to him in his sleep, the patients with visiting family are supported by a psychic (Jarinpattra Rueangram) who helps the families communicate with their sons or husbands. Weerasethakul, along with cinematographer Diego Garcia, frames everything in master shots and keeps people in the middle distance, only springing a few close ups for maximum visual impact. Along with the lack of music score and the sound design of nature, kids playing, tractors digging up the field next to the hospital, there’s something reserved and everyday about the visual approach. Even though an ancient god might casually visit your table and announce themselves or a strange alien shape might be glimpsed in the sky. It’s a meditative film and open to interpretation. I’m sure there are specific details and ideas about the landscape and the culture I might be missing, but I connected to the sense of companionship between Jenira and Itt across their conscious and dreaming states. To me, I also felt a real subtextual theme about the military presence, the history of conflict from ancient gods to wars decades old, and the hope for an end to all of it. I don’t know – there’s something both beautiful and prosaic about what Weerasethakul puts to screen here – the prosaic becomes invested with even more meaning with how its collapsed together with surreal touches. Available to stream on SBS On Demand. It’s quite something and I’m still getting my head around it. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 