Syndromes and a Century

This was a wonderful film. The film-maker's name is Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Get practising your prononciation, he'll be on everyone's lips sooner or later.

Using the divisive stylistics of the cinema of inconsequentiality (see my Silent Light review from January) but injects it with a dose of humour and deftness sadly lacking in others. Instead of being as Peter Bradshaw puts it (in his albeit favourable review of Silent Light) "weirdly passionless", this film is full of passion, full of the joy of life. It also possesses one of the best endings I've seen for a long, long time: so surprising, so incongruous and just plain funky you leave the cinema with a grin on your face. If you'd been reserving judgement up to that point, it's hard not to go with it.

It is ostensibly a film about the film-maker's doctor parents and how they met. But there's no grand love story, no embraces set to soaring strings, it's the little things that we see here, those apparent inconsequential conversations that you remember as pivotal. There's a great scene between an orchid enthusiast and the female doctor. They are obviously fond of each other and despite their easy friendliness there's a little tension around them. Leaning on a balcony the orchid fan describes a predicament: he loves someone but doesn't know how to tell them. He quickly tells the doctor it's not her, "someone else", and she asks a few light-hearted questions, her pose relaxed, open. Whilst he talks, the orchid man absent-mindedly peels an orange. Evidently the subject matter is somewhat tough, as the doctor laughs as the orange splits and spills all over the place. "Is the orange crushed?" she asks, in between bursts of laughter.

No-one seems to know what it's really about, but who cares, really? There are nods to Buddhist themes of reincarnation in the repetition of scenes in different cities with different people, as well as in the lingering (and sometimes near-Lynchian) shots of statues in hospital grounds. There's perhaps a discreet comment on the impersonality of modern life in the teenage boy playing tennis in hospital corridors, and perhaps a hint of unrequited love in the short but troubled scenes between lovers. Nevertheless, I totally agree with Peter Bradshaw (again), who found it "a transcendentally happy experience: inducing a joyous and calm kind of euphoria". Go see it, if you can.