Syndromes and a Century

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes
and a Century is a remarkable, mysterious work, a film that's
constantly slipping away from the viewer. It's a warm, disarmingly
playful mood piece, as ephemeral and sensual as wisps of smoke swirling
around the black hole of a vent: a strangely eerie image that
Weerasethakul spends several long moments lingering over towards the
film's slippery, abstract denouement. But it takes a digressive, wayward
journey to get to that sinister image of deep blackness swallowing up
white fog. The film opens straightforwardly enough, in a hospital office
where Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul) is interviewing a new doctor,
Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram), who's come to the hospital from a stint in the
army. She asks him a number of questions, some of them conventional and
some of them more abstract and conceptual; their conversation seems to
be a mix of an employment interview, a psychological evaluation and a
whimsical series of non-sequiturs. Throughout most of the interview,
Weerasethakul keeps the camera trained in a long, static shot on Nohng's
face as he reacts with varying degrees of curiosity and puzzlement to
these strange questions. At the end of the interview, a hospital orderly
comes to fetch Nohng and Toey, and as the doctors walk outside, the
camera pans away from them towards an open, grassy field, which
Weerasethakul frames in a static shot as the opening credits roll and
the doctors' conversation continues offscreen. This scene introduces a
subtle disjunction between audio and video as the doctors move away from
this field, going about their rounds, without the audio fading away or
cutting off. It is as though Weerasethakul is subverting the narrative
stability of the opening scenes, suggesting that something more is going
on beneath the surface, that all is not as it seems — he drops a
further clue as, towards the end of this offscreen conversation, the
doctors stutter to a surreal, confused halt in what seems to be a
metafictional acknowledgment that these are actors playing doctors.

This
opening, so destabilizing, by turns weirdly humorous and haunting,
establishes the dominant mode of Weerasethakul's film, in which he's
constantly toying with narrative cohesion only to pull back into moody
diversions and puzzling interjections. Even so, there is a hint of a
story running through the first half of the film. Toey is pursued by an
admirer, who had been waiting for her throughout the opening sequence
and who haunts her during her rounds, watching her from a distance and
confessing his love to her. Nohng, meanwhile, adjusts to his new life in
the hospital, and a dentist, Ple (Arkanae Cherkam) grows fascinated
with a young monk named Sakda (Sakda Kaewbuadee). These disconnected
stories and hints of stories weave through the film, at least until the
halfway point introduces an even more disorienting disjunction: the
opening scenes play out a second time, with slightly altered lines and
situations, in a new context, an ultramodern hospital with clean, bright
white corridors and antiseptic working conditions. If the first half
centers roughly around Toey, the second half concerns itself more with
Nohng, but otherwise the relationship between the two halves of the film
is ambiguous. Perhaps one is the not-so-distant past (references to Star
Wars possibly date it to the 80s) and one the not-so-distant
future, or else they are both the present, representing the gaps in
technology that coexist within modernity, or else they are alternate
perspectives on the same set of characters, living the same stories over
and over again with only minor tweaks.


There is a wonderful sense of ambiguity
running through this film, as Weerasethakul simply strings together an
elliptical series of events, anecdotes and moments, never drawing any
firm lines connecting them to one another. It's a series of stories and
non-stories, of moments both profound and prosaic: a monk playing the
guitar, doctors drinking booze from a bottle hidden within a prosthetic
leg, a solar eclipse, a picnic in the country, two lovers kissing by a
window and, in the enigmatic finale, a large crowd exercising to the
beat of an exuberant pop tune. It all fits together without quite
forming a cohesive whole. The film is full of loose ends and lingering
mysteries, characters who drift into the film for a few scenes only to
disappear again.

An old monk (Sin Kaewpakpin) appears twice, once
in the first half and once in the second, and each time tells a story
about being haunted by dreams of chickens and falling out of bed as a
result. But the subtle differences in the man's mood as he tells this
story dictate the thematic throughline of his character (or characters):
the first time he tells the story he is genuinely convinced that
chickens are haunting him as a result of childhood cruelty towards the
birds, and that they wanted revenge, while the second time he laughs the
incident off as merely a dream. Linking these two perspectives is the
chasm between superstition and rationality, between genuine belief in
the supernatural and the mere recounting of it as folklore and legend.
Is this, then, the true difference between past and present, between the
country hospital depicted in the first half and the ultramodern
facility in the second half, which seems to have been built atop the
dilapidated earlier building?

It's unclear, but this conflict
between tradition and modernity weaves through the film in sometimes
surprising ways. In one scene, Ple is performing a dental exam on Sakda,
and the two begin talking. The young monk confesses that he doesn't
really want to be a monk but feels trapped in it, drawn to it by forces
he doesn't understand. He'd really wanted to be a radio DJ or a comic
book store owner, he says, and he loves "modern music," while the
dentist is a bit of a pop singer himself in his off-hours. He begins
singing for the monk, prompting the patient to ask if this is an exam or
a concert. Who knows, and who cares? It's probably both, just as
Weerasethakul's film vacillates between memory, abstract tone poem and
narrative drama.


Later, banners billow in sinuous sine wave
patterns in the wind above a stage as a Ple and his guitarist perform
before a carnival audience. It's a wonderful moment, bathed in cool
nighttime colors, subdued neon hues wafting through the night, as the
song, an aching love ballad, drifts above the twang of the guitar. After
the concert, Ple meets up with Sakda and gives him his newest CD,
telling him, "Normally I only sing about teeth and gums, but this album
is all love songs." It's like the set-up for an obscure joke: what does
the dentist/pop singer say to the monk? And the punchline is as sublime
as it is unexpected. One pictures it as a New Yorker-style gag
cartoon, the monk and the dentist standing together by a balcony in a
garden, the night alive with insect chirps all around them, and this
deadpan caption set off against the poetry of the scene. The humor in
this film is rich and often startling, burbling up from out of the
framework of conversations that seem serious and poignant one moment,
absurdly hilarious the next — Sakda and Ple transition from speaking
about reincarnation and Ple's dead brother to this deadpan punchline.
Even better, the line casts new light on the song Ple had been singing
earlier, which is indeed a love ballad but which contained a line that
seems puzzling and weird at first — a tribute to a girl's shining white
teeth — but that makes sense once one realizes that the lyricist is a
dentist, who can't help but return to his favored material even in the
context of a love song.

The unlikely friendship between the
dentist and the monk provides one possibility for the thematic
implications of the film's halved structure. While the pair form a
connection during a dental exam in the first half of the film, when this
scene plays out again in the second half, it's in an antiseptic,
blindingly white operating room, surrounded by rows of identical
cubicals, with a nurse assisting the doctor. Patient and doctor don't
talk here, except in laconic phrases about the mechanics of the exam
itself. The gap between these two scenes suggests that the advances of
modernity are fostering disconnection and increasing the distance
between people, making it more difficult to form the kinds of human
bridges that might allow a doctor and his patient to bond over pop
music. Even so, Weerasethakul isn't making some simplistic point about
the alienating effects of technology; this is simply one thread, and it
is counterbalanced by the scenes in the second half between Nohng and a
young patient he takes an interest in and tries to connect with.


Of course, the most potent form of connection
shown in the film is the lure of sexuality, which remains a barely
articulated undercurrent until a late scene between Nohng and his
girlfriend, where they stand by a window and kiss, then talk about him
relocating with her, then kiss some more. The scene ends with Nohng
laughing with embarrassment as he adjusts his erection in his pants, a
moment of frank sexuality that startlingly brings sex to the forefront,
if only for a second. Such pleasures are fleeting — the couple's
situation is obviously precarious and they seem on the verge of a
breakup — but no less real. This is indicative of Weerasethakul's method
in general: he allows themes and moments to emerge organically,
presented for their own sake rather than as components in a tightly knit
narrative framework.

At one point, when Toey is pursued by her
admirer, she distracts him from his anguished declarations of love by
telling a lengthy story about an orchid grower (Sophon Pukanok) she
meets in a market, and her subsequent unarticulated desire for this
other man. This anecdote rambles along without resolution; it begins as a
story she's telling to a new suitor, but then it drifts off into its
own place, expanding into a sensual depiction of an afternoon spent at
the farmer's country home. This story is interrupted once by the
intrusion of the present-day scene, but after that it ceases to be a
flashback and takes on a reality of its own, as though it is not a
memory but something happening to Toey in real-time. Weerasethakul never
resolves either the story of the orchid-grower or the story of the
other admirer; the flashback cuts off after the farmer obliquely tries
to tell Toey that he loves her.

This meandering approach to
storytelling serves Weerasethakul well. Syndromes and a Century
is a rich, lively film, packed with moments of sensuality, grace and
beauty. When the spirit moves him, Weerasethakul will pause to observe a
solar eclipse, or the pale blue of the sky as seen through a web of
tree branches, or a dragonfly briefly alighting on the rippling surface
of a pond, a magical moment caught almost accidentally within the
camera's view and stitched into the film for its inherent beauty and
mystery rather than for any import it might have for the characters or
stories Weerasethakul is elliptically telling. This openness inflects
every frame of this film, which is very much alive with possibility; the
narrative itself seems to be constantly branching off, suggesting the
potential to follow multiple paths, to see the same scenes from multiple
perspectives. It's a film, also, about the possibilities of human
connection, about feeling empathy for others, about wanting to heal
pains both physical and emotional. It is, above all, a beautiful and
moving film, a nearly overwhelming cinematic experience that is dense
with ideas and with suggestive imagery.