Syndromes and a Century

From the first idiosyncratically composed image, you are aware of being in the presence of a filmmaker whose whimsical inventiveness is without parallel. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells two hospital stories: one for his mother and one for his father, both of whom are doctors. Like the director’s previous Tropical Malady, the story simply stops after a while and recycles itself in a different register as if to say, “Let me tell you that again.” Both stories wander into sidetracks in a genial, but truly radical, fashion. A monk relates dreams about chickens, a dentist turns out to be a pretty good Thai country music singer, a man proposes marriage and is answered with a story about orchids. If narrative’s power is its ability to organise experience through the tyranny of a linear trajectory, Weerasethakul’s achievement is to refuse that power, and in its place offer the glorious indirection of human life, which just might be the basis of a bold, new realism.

The Thai director's films doggedly eschew conventional narrative and aesthetic development in favor of a more free-flowing, non-linear atmosphere of mysterious contemplation, one that his latest employs to mesmerizing effect.

Slant Magazine