Movie Enthusiast Issue 69: Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Somnolent Films
Welcome back! Thanks for your patience during my summer hiatus.
Listening
Earlier this year, I stopped by my old high school film classroom to record an interview about my journey from filmmaker to film critic. Go have a listen to my origin story and hear my recommendations for high school students aspiring to get involved in the world of film!
Watching
Abbas Kiarostami once said that he wouldn’t mind if you fell asleep watching one of his movies. Lucrecia Martel has spoken similarly of cinema that lulls you into a nap, of a film that hits you like a ray of sunlight through opaque curtains in a musty living room upholstered with timeworn furniture that hasn’t lost its ability to comfort. (Okay, that image is mine, not hers.) This view of cinema is starkly at odds with the prevailing view of movies in the West, that they exist for our consumption, or for our entertainment, or to excite us, or to make us think, or perhaps to rouse us to action. I sense that economic worry undergirds this view: time and its corollary are valuable commodities, so if we’re going to put the effort into going to a theater, suffering through 30 minutes of trailers, putting down as much money for one ticket as we spend in a month for Netflix, we’d better be getting something for all our trouble. If I just wanted to nap, why leave the house?
I’ve written about Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Joe) frequently in this newsletter, and thanks to Criterion Channel I’ve been able to catch up on most of his filmography (save for Blissfully Yours, which they aren’t streaming; if anyone could direct me to a legal source where I can watch it, I’d be grateful). Joe has a lot of clout with the film festival crowd. The surface reasons are fairly obvious. He’s an openly gay filmmaker, he’s decidedly more influenced by his native country’s spirituality than by Western spirituality (a win for postcolonialism, though some of the qualities that Western audiences find appealing in this speaks to the more troubling lure of the exotic qua exotic), he is unafraid to make political statements—however subtly—about the wrongdoings of the Thai government. He’s also just plain funny, oftentimes to the shock of a more refined sensibility. He uses scatological humor not to be lurid, but to take account for the messiness and unpredictability of embodiment.
A few weeks ago I was talking (offline) to a few friends from Twitter about great art. I brought up Tropical Malady as a case in point, but I found it difficult to explain why I thought it was great. A plot summary wouldn’t do, since there isn’t much of a plot in the whole back half of a movie (“so, this guy goes searching for his lover, who turned into a tiger spirit, or something? and it’s just an hour of that, just him like walking through the jungle”). And trying to explain the technical qualities that make this film amazing wouldn’t really get the point across, either. It would be like trying to explain to someone how Anna Karenina is a masterpiece by describing how Tolstoy crafts his sentences and sequences his chapters. You have to just read the thing, and you either see its greatness as a novel or you don’t.
How then can I communicate what this film transmitted to me? Maybe I could start by explaining how it made me feel in that last hour, where nothing of narrative import that I can remember really happens. I pretty distinctly recall lying on my couch, propped up on one side, legs slightly tucked, and gently massaging my calves. When the movie finished, I paused to think: when was the last time I was intentionally gentle with myself? Seemingly it had been a while. I was caught so unawares by the atmosphere Joe created, of jungle wildlife rustling through the underbrush, of wind stirring the trees, of feet padding through mud and soil. The famous scene at the midpoint of the film, marking the point where it transitions from a “conventional” story about two men in love to the fantastical bodiless tiger hunt, is so sensorily jarring that, if you’ve stuck with the film to that point, you’re made fully attentive and receptive to what comes next: after his lover relieves himself in a ditch by the side of the road, our main man seizes his hand and takes a big whiff of his scent. It’s an astonishingly brusque gesture, and where other movies (probably ones directed by Park Chan-wook) might have used a moment like this as the gateway to more carnal explorations of love, Joe uses it as his cue to reorient his lovers’ relationship to their materiality—by releasing one of them from material constraints altogether. The back half of the movie is extremely erotic, but shifts our attention from the corporal experience of the erotic to the immaterial experience of it.
Syndromes and a Century, which I understand to be in some way influenced by the story of how Joe’s parents met, likewise uses contrasts between gentle and harsh gestures to great effect. Scenes patiently replay themselves—in one pair of scenes viewed from two different angles, if not from different dimensions, a Buddhist monk explains his troubling ongoing relationship with poultry to a doctor—the camera takes its time floating down hallways or not moving anywhere at all. There are interruptions to the tranquility: a kid hitting a squash ball against the wall at the end of a hospital corridor, a high-octane group exercise class that caps off the film. When these loud moments hit, or when we transition away from them, they leave a more lasting impression than any throwaway jump scare in a horror film because the quietness they interrupt touches us so deeply. Again, I would be at a loss to explain with much specificity the narrative details of a scene like the one where one of the doctors submits some coworkers(?) and patients(?) to a hypnosis demonstration(?), other than that it involves a bottle of bourbon(?) stashed inside an anatomical model of a leg(?!).
There are certainly other, possibly more obvious qualities to Joe’s cinema that would serve as better points of entry. You could point to his use of nonprofessional actors, like Jenjira Pongpas, who has had recurring appearances in four of Joe’s films as (more or less) herself, or the neighborhood locals whose individual storytelling contributions comprise the plot of his debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon. Someone who is better versed in the mythologies and spiritualities Joe draws from could probably speak more compellingly to those specific selling points than I could. And one would be remiss to recommend spending time in Joe’s worlds at all if all his artistry were just meaningless posturing. Rather, it’s the depth of meaning you can find in his work that elevates it above “curiosity from a film festival wunderkind” to “must-see cinema.” To date my favorite film of his was also his most recent, and also the first I watched, Cemetery of Splendour. I had known I was going to have to take the plunge with Joe someday, so I chose a lazy Saturday midmorning when I was feeling just awake enough to endure two hours of the unknown without recourse to more “important” distractions. The film plays powerfully with the line between wakefulness and sleep—we might say sleepwalking—and sustains the viewer in the uncertain penumbra that separates them. Incredibly, it held my attention throughout and I didn’t even begin to nod off at all for its duration. Though I wouldn’t have counted it a point against the film if I had.
Reading
I was having this conversation with some people at A24 about labels and hyphenates. Like, who gets to be American, and who is forced to hyphenate it with something else? Do you embrace it, or do you reject it? I think labels can be important, because in a way, when you name a thing, it comes into existence and we can talk about it. But labels can also be really restricting and limiting. If I'm an Asian-American female director, then my films aren’t going to get compared to Mike Leigh's, for example.
—Lulu Wang on directing The Farewell
Coming Soon
David Fincher is (finally!) returning to movies! For Netflix, he’ll be directing Mank, from a screenplay written by his own father, about Herman Mankiewicz, co-screenwriter of Citizen Kane. Gary Oldman will headline the cast, the rest of which is still TBA.
Damien Chazelle’s next film will be Babylon, starring Emma Stone, about the period in the 1920s when Hollywood transitioned from silent films to talkies. Consider me intrigued, as this project would seem to take Chazelle’s interest in music and rhythm on film in a direction that doesn’t necessarily entail that this new movie follow any specific genre format.
There’s been a lot going on in my life and the film forum where I used to get all my news is members-only now, so I haven’t been paying much attention to the Venice Film Festival or TIFF this year. But evidently Joker was good enough to win the Golden Lion? Somebody’s going to have to invite me out of the house to go see it though because I have a bit of Gotham fatigue, if I’m being honest. I’ve also seen The Painted Bird get called “the worst film I have ever seen in over two decades of fest competitions”!! And preliminarily it looks like Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network is having an equally grisly reception, which does not surprise me in light of how uninspiring Non-Fiction was.
That Taika Waititi movie about the kid who has Hitler for an imaginary friend finally has a trailer and, hmm. I did not know that Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace) was going to be in this! Good for her.
I will be going to New York Film Festival for the second year in a row! I’m very excited both to see The Irishman, which I was relieved not to have to pay $120 for (contrary to what they had been advertising on the NYFF site), and also to hear Scorsese give a live talk on cinema the nextday. Also on my docket are the new films by Céline Sciamma and the Dardennes, a program of Sergei Parajanov short films, and a retrospective screening of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, which I somehow have not yet seen! I passed up the chance to nab tickets for Albert Serra’s Liberté, though if someone wants to commission a piece from me on it I could be convinced to make it a last-minute addition.