Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films tend to dazzle and confound in equal measure with their quiet intensity and evocations of things moving on planes unseen. Cemetery of Splendour hinges on evoking a texture at once evanescent and peculiarly dense, where placid surfaces vibrate with implicit connotations and tantalising enigmas. The film unfolds in a small hospital mostly dedicated to caring for a number of military invalids who suffer from a strange illness. The patients are beset by a sleeping sickness that comes on and then departs suddenly and with cruel randomness. Volunteer nurse Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) comes to work at the hospital and soon finds this is just one of the tantalising enigmas around the hospital. Jen is a simple middle-aged woman with one leg shorter than the other. Married to an expatriate former American soldier, Richard (Richard Abramson), Jen usually makes some money selling her knitting work to patients in the hospitals she works at, but finds this scarcely an option in a ward filled with comatose men. The hospital, she realises, used to be her own childhood school, which has since shifted into a modern, far fancier building nearby.
Another, younger volunteer, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), has a reputation as a psychic so great she supposedly got a job offer from the FBI. A playing field neighbouring the hospital is being dug up, ostensibly for a fibre-optic cable hub but possibly as part of a mysterious project connected with the sleeping men and Keng’s other job. She also discovers a notebook, compiled by one of the patients, a man named Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), a haphazard collection drawings and writings that might be military code but resembles some piece of medieval esoterica charting a journey through the netherworld, concluding in the single word “Hello” inscribed like a personal greeting addressed to her. She meets Itt properly when he has one of his periodic revivals, and soon finds such close accord with him that she tells Richard they have a new son. But things don’t get truly weird until two pretty young women introduce themselves to Jen whilst she has lunch and explain they’re incarnations of the goddesses in the local shrine.
Weerasethakul’s works defiantly invite being written off as cinematic rohypnol by some and accepted meekly as the essence of Zen-like sublimeness in the movies by others. But the Thai auteur has a cunning about him that moves like a sidewinder, slipping under the guards of perception as he painstakingly evokes the humdrum working of the hospital and the sound of leafy shimmer in the neighbouring woods, whilst postulating conceptual fancies that evoke worlds out of sight and zones of experience beyond the liminal whist gaining real suggestive power that nudge the film somehow into the realm of epic fantasy. His method here is stringently minimalist, lacking even the flights of overt, visualised fancy that made some of his work accessible at least on a level of amusing visualised strangeness – the queer shape-shifting tiger boy of Tropical Malady (2004), or the monstrous forest men and talking, muff-diving catfish of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives (2010) – unless you count a shot of a river and sky with a microbe slithering across lens, a sudden intrusion by the most minute of life forms into his field of vision, the microcosmic and macrocosmic in sudden, bizarre, joyful convergence.
Cemetery of Splendour feels more deliberated than some of Weerasethakul’s earlier work, which the filmmaker admitted he sometimes offered right out of the pits of his imaginative consciousness rather than as derivations of thoroughly processed concepts. The last half-hour of Uncle Boonmee, for instance, reached towards some kind of statement about modern life that never quite crystallised, but remained intriguing nonetheless. Cemetery of Splendour holds that thought, and eventually coalesces into a more explicable, if no more literal, set of metaphors. And yet the film mostly defies any tendencies towards the academic, as Weerasethakul offers a spry and allusive contemplation of the tension between Thailand in the contemporary epoch and its eternal landscapes, and the state of the modern world in general, built upon the splendours and graveyards of human pasts. The film teems with off-hand observations charged with a sense life in its biological realities – a shot of Itt’s urine slowly collecting in a bag hooked to his bed, a bird and its chicks traipse scarcely noticed around the hospital – and the strange new dimensions of human behaviour – a young man holding a mobile phone up so a woman can chat with a friend whilst she’s busy cooking food in a street kiosk. Weerasethakul oscillates between two images of technology interacting with the landscape, one invasive – the heavy machinery digging up the pitch, leaving great muddy holes in the ground that the local soccer ball-booting kids still gleefully and defiantly negotiate – and the other interactive, with turbines that power the hospital constantly turned by the flow of the great neighbouring river. Weerasethakul probes this question of adaptation versus intrusion in layers rippling like currents in the river.
Jen, as played by Pongpas, one of the director’s regular players, is a splendid characterisation precisely in her utter normality. A homey, generally jovial lodestone, with her blend of piety and knowing bawdiness, patriotism, and her thrifty craft-art, she’s slightly paranoid in her attempts to read the curious circumstances she finds herself in. “I’ve already touched too many penises in my life,” she notes when one of the sleeping men gets erect to the fascination of the attendants, suggesting perhaps her past has been rather more complex than we see now. She has found herself a husband online from another country, reaping the fruits of a stateless, technologically-enabled modernity that sits at odds with her simple, parochial personality and the roots of her enveloping culture, having already learnt a lesson about the illusory quality of that borderless world – she was able to speak English on-line with dictionaries but has trouble communicating with her husband in life. She develops a dogged friendship with both the enigmatic Keng and the ill-starred Itt, feeling maternal urges towards Itt, only for this connection to evolve into something altogether more strange as meetings occur on both the physical and spiritual plains.
As both an artist who’s defined himself as a sly critic of aspects of his national identity but who is also fairly lonely in representing it on an international level and standing up for his entirely native approach to his art, Weerasethakul insistently implies a level of socio-political meaning throughout, carrying on a refrain from Uncle Boonmee in commenting on the dark side of Thai history through oblique, ethereal concepts. The two incarnate goddesses explain to Jen the reason why the soldiers can’t recover from their tropical malady because the hospital is built over an ancient ruined palace, and the ancient kings and warlords of Siam still fight battles in the spirit world utilising their karmic energy. The soldiers in the hospital are postulated as eternal warriors, awakening and dying again according to the needs of state, slaves to the powers of the moment and past, with the clear inference that although the individuals are different, every age sees its servants of power used and sacrificed for the ends of that power. At one point tubes that shimmer with dim, fluorescent hues are set up by the sleeping soldiers’ beds, supposedly designed to keep their bad dreams at bay, with reports that the American military had great success using them in Afghanistan.
Such gadgets rob the men even of the honour of troubled sleep and the destabilising potential of submerged psyches and remembered ills – an idea any poet would find nightmarish but also a gift that Shakespeare’s Richard Crouchback might have traded his kingdom for even quicker than a horse. Jen herself has always been tied in life to soldiers, including her first husband and Richard, suggested to be a Vietnam veteran, another actor from times and troubles past. And yet those same machines seem to vibrate with quiet healing power, and begin to open doors through which Jen, Itt, and Keng step. Keng’s psychic gifts give her the chance to reach into the dream-world the sleeping soldiers exist in most of the time and bring reports back. Weerasethakul implicates cinema as another dream-soothing machine with a shot of a cinema foyer as the movie audiences file out (with Itt, having dropped back into his somnolent state, carried listlessly away by two ushers under Jen’s forlorn gaze), all bathed in neon lighting that blinks in the same alternating shades as the gadgets back in the hospital. This comes after Weerasethakul has a good-natured dig at the popular fare of years past in Thai theatres as he has Jen and Itt watching a trailer for a gloriously cheesy-looking martial-arts movie. Itt, when he awakens, gains in reward for his times without sense a newly enriched sensual palate, able to smell odours beyond most and return with reports on the physical traits of his dream world.
Cemetery of Splendour might still be a bit distended, laden with some superfluous scenes and touches that suggest a less than profound facet to Weerasethakul’s satirical and philosophical purpose, like a party of TV hosts flogging cosmetics that smell like spunk to the hospital patients, and nearly arranged signs left about the woods spelling out homiletic wisdom. It doesn’t quite reach into the same deep place somewhere in the id that Uncle Boonmee’s forest men stirred, the primal eyes staring balefully out of the forest with threat and longing, or encompass an experience as stirring as the death and transcendence of that film’s title character. What was epic there is here transmuted into a more ephemeral experience akin to a tone-poem, with aspects akin to the classic pastoral mode – those who venture out into the woods soon experience transformation and new connection. Weerasethakul manages to bring most of his strands together in a climactic half-hour that consists of nothing more than Jen and Keng walking in the forest neighbouring the hospital, but with the ingenious concept that Keng has used her mediumistic powers to join with Itt in his dream state. She is able to let him speak and experience through her as well as describe the world of the past he’s immersed in, describing the wonders of the long-destroyed temple that used to sprawl across the site – now only some artistic memorials and the marks of ancient floods soaked into the bark of trees mark the roll and retreat of history’s tides, both political and personal, the worlds unseen and forgotten that have forged us and play on our skin felt like a soft breeze even as the now comes on like the flood. The crowning moment isn’t as overtly strange as the infamous catfish scene of Uncle Boonmee but strays into the same beggaring territory as Keng-as-Itt licks Jen’s scarred and malformed leg for the sake of therapeutic enchantment, suggesting zones of erotic experience that sunder all boundaries between individuals in one of the strangest ménage-a-trois you’re ever likely to witness. The very last shot is both haunting and very funny in contemplating the notion that sometimes sleeping might be more like life than waking.
