Syndromes and A Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

[marty]

Fortissimo Gets Worldwide Rights to Weerasethakul's Latest

Leading sales company Fortissimo Films has announced the acquisition of worldwide rights to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Syndromes and A Century," one of seven films commissioned by the New Crowned Hope Festival celebrating Mozart. In an announcement, the film was described as exploring, "how we remember and how our sense of happiness can be acquired by something so insignificant. The film focuses on the memories of two doctors, one male and one female, and is inspired by the filmmaker's parents before they were lovers. The two reminiscences are told over two architectural spaces, one when the filmmaker was young, and the other in contemporary time." New Crowned Hope will run from mid-November through mid-December in Vienna.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

This is, what, the second title change? Whatever, it's still near the very top of my most-anticipated list, jockeying for position with Utopia.

[John Cope]

Yeah, I can't wait for this or Utopia. Anything Joe touches turns to gold.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Incidentally, there's more potential gold coming out of the New Crowned Hope project, including new films from Bahman Ghobadi and Tsai Ming-liang. Somewhat interesting (in an anorak kind of way) to note that most of the films in the lineup have undergone title changes.

EDIT: Fortissimo has a page for the Apichatpong film, with the closest thing to a plot summary I've seen for it:

History I: At a small town hospital, Mr. Toa spends his morning trying to court Dr. Nantarat. He is painfully shy, but tries very hard to declare his love. The woman doctor remains unreceptive; she is still questioning her heart about Mr. Sopon, an orchid expert she recently met on a visit to Sopon's orchid farm.

At the same hospital, Mr. Arkanae, a dentist, develops an unexplained attraction to a young monk.

History II: At a downtown hospital, Mr. Toa spends his morning trying to court Dr. Nantarat. He is painfully shy, but tries very hard to declare his love. The woman doctor remains unreceptive.

At the same hospital, Dr. Jaruchai, an intern from a military, starts his first day of working. Dr. Nantarat, his supervisor, is nowhere to be seen. He visits his friend at a physical therapy ward where he is led underground. There, he has a drink with two elderly women doctors from the Red Cross. Dr. Jaruchai finishes his day with a meeting with Ms. Joy, his overly beautiful girlfriend.

He sure does like those two-part structures. I fear the term "overly beautiful girlfriend" sets up unrealistic expectations.

[Grimfarrow]

Great review at d+kaz:

Syndromes and a Century

Using the calmly microcosmic setting of hospitals (country and urban), personal inspiration from the lives of his mother and father, and of the motif, meandering from the foreground to the background of healthiness (of body, spirit, and environment), Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates a serene and mysterious film on humble romances, human connections, memories and relativity. Like Tropical Malady before it, Weerasethakul bifurcates his film into two halves; but this time the split is less into two different modes of storytelling as it is a more of subtle form of repetition, with variations, of obliquely similar stories told in different settings and focusing on the respective pasts of the director's mother and that of his father.

The first half of Syndromes and a Century is set in a country hospital and focuses on a female doctor there, Dr. Toey, (Nantarat Sawaddikul), who is casually pursued by another doctor in the ward. After an abrupt proposal from the young man, she tells him the story of her romantic meeting an orchid hunter, who, she says, she is not necessarily going to marry. Weerasethakul, who has a playful style of unexpected digressions and sidetracks in both style and narrative, dramatizes the doctor's story in an elliptical manner, visualizing her meeting of the man at a nursery, the acquisition of a rare orchid, and a later picnic to the countryside with his aunt. Both Dr. Toey's talk with the courting doctor and her story of the romance are concluded ambiguously, as she relates how the botanist confesses his love her by telling her that he is secretly in love with a woman and does not know how to reveal it to her. Meanwhile, the hospital dentist (Arkanae Cherkam), who sings Thai country music as a hobby, bonds with a young monk who wanted to be a DJ After a hospital-run festival for a Buddhist holiday, the dentist confesses that he sees his dead brother reincarnated in the monk, and one senses a strange attraction or affection between the two. The monk denies the reincarnation (in a way, perhaps, related to his denial of his music ambitions—both the connection to the doctor and the hobby being inappropriate for his position), and this section of the film likewise concludes without closure, the dentist pursuing, but then losing, the monk. The second half of the film starts up without concluding either the friendship of the dentist and monk or closing the romantic relations of the female doctor. Instead, the setting is moved to a more modernized hospital in Bangkok, and the second half starts just as the first half did, with Dr. Toey interviewing a just-hired hospital employee, Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram), with the same love struck staff member waiting aside to talk to her. But this time the story follows Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram). He makes his first exploratory rounds in the hospital, meets two female doctors and talks about his hometown, casually interviews a youth who has been poisoned and watches a female doctor try to cure him with chakra, and eventually meets his girlfriend Joy, whose company is sending her to a newly industrialized district and wants him to move out there with her.

One of the unexpected—and most welcome—things about Syndromes and a Century and Weerasethakul's films in general is that while maintaining a familial resemblance to the monumental master-shot style made famous by Hou Hsiou-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Weerasethakul's work carries a serene air of gentleness, off-handedness, openness, and a complete lack of pretension—traits that strongly humanize and personalize his work. However puzzling and mysterious Syndromes and a Century may be, the filmmaker never allows the opaqueness of his film to burden the viewer with the task strict, literal decipherment. These successes are rooted in Weerasethakul's casually realist aesthetic, his unexpected humor, and in his equally casual experimental digressions. These tendencies make his movies feel very spontaneous and unpredictable, if not simply free-flowing—qualities in delightful opposition to the usual plodding solemnity that such a structural and highly formal style usually preclude. In the first half, the film will listen in on Dr. Toey prescribing something for the dreams of a monk, but then cut away to give a moment to a secondary character, and only minutes later the doctor is recalling her story, which will bloom out of the film—never feeling like a flashback but rather feeling like one of many options the film can move to at any given time, a tender way of looking at both memory (or perhaps recollection) and storytelling cinematically. A prime example of this quality is within Dr. Toey's story, where, while considering her feelings for her orchid seller while on a picnic, she hears about the folkloric background of a field nearby. One expects the film to move again towards a visualization of this tale, but instead Weerasethakul settles for a variety of character-less shots of the field and forest area. But then suddenly there is a cut to an event from the parable, a beautiful eclipse, but the odd and supple shot of the darkened sun does not seem to exist either inside Dr. Toey's story of her picnic, nor in the fable itself. The second half of the film likewise has such deviations, but in that case they tend more towards documentary-like camera movements, moving around the city hospital, its modern rooms, and the statues on the grounds outside of it, somewhat reminiscent of the documentary technique of Michelangelo Antonioni.

While Syndromes and a Century is purposefully unschematic in its dual stories, the country/city dichotomy is split by a style that changes in the second half, where the camera is loosened up to track around (often autonomous of characters), dolly in and out, pan 360 degrees, and even free itself in a handheld shot following Dr. Nohng making his first rounds in the hospital. This is an inquisitive look at the dynamism of the city hospital, and not necessarily a critical one, which one could easily diagnose in the film's contrast of country and city locations. Whereas Weerasethakul's camera basks in most of the stable set-ups in the country (and, for example, emphasizes natural lighting in its interiors), in the city there is a curiosity about the urban progress (emphasizing artificial light, especially in the city version of the dentist's room, which is cold and hyper-clinical). The actual function and abilities of the doctors does not seem to change with the setting; rather, the move to the city simply makes more public the idea—more subtly expressed in the country—of healthiness of spirit, body, and ultimately, life. This publicness of healthiness is seen both in the statutes of Thai progressives around the hospital, and in public exercise, like aerobics and jogging, done around the city. Inside these contexts are the stories of the characters—Dr. Toey's oblique memory of a romance and the dentists' hopeful and ambiguous relationship with the monk in the country, and Dr. Nohng's low-key passivity in the city, wary of moving with his girlfriend and curious about a patient that neither medicine nor spiritual remedies can cure. If the first half seems more nostalgically pensive, focused on personal stories, and evokes more of a sense of memory than in the second half, these feelings are replaces by a curiosity for the progress emblematized in the modern setting, of the space these doctors and their patients inhabit, and of the understated ways this different setting expresses itself in relationships around the hospital.

In Weerasethakul's unpresuming style there seems less an overarching point to the connections and repetitions between these characters and their settings as there is a series of momentary quotidian observations—paradoxically considered at a substantial, contemplative length and with a playful and inquisitive attitude—about human interaction in a place built ostensibly for the betterment of fellow human beings. These mild and mysterious rhymes in the film are, refreshingly, less overtly structural than they are almost philosophically presumed—such similarities are just a part of the way life works. Thus the motif, introduced by the monks in the film, of the notions of karma and reincarnation, which suggest a kind of continuation and connection. But, as in the monk's denial of the dentist's assertion about his brother, and, more obliquely still, as in the unresolved romantic situation of Dr. Toey, these follow-throughs and connections between people and places sometimes are only half-formed, or, more hopefully, still in the making. --Reviewed by Daniel Kasman

[davida2]

Inteview with Weerasethakul, touching upon the new film briefly, along with Thai film in general...

[pianocrash]

Banned!? So much for hoping on that early thai dvd release, I guess.

[Matt]

Strand Releasing will be distributing this in the US. They seem to picking up the slack from other distributors: they will also be distributing Tsai Ming-Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Aki Kaurismäki's Lights in the Dusk.

[Barmy]

12 weeks into its US release it has grossed $16,340.

[Matt]

12 weeks into its US release it has grossed $16,340.

That's Strand distribution for you.

[Oedipax]

Sigh. I really miss Wellspring. The DVD probably won't be much consolation either, given Strand's track record with transfers isn't great.

[portnoy]

guys, i love this movie but let's be honest - it's not exactly commercial material. the audience i saw it with at the ifc center seemed to mostly hate it, and its reviews weren't stellar enough to blast it out of the art audience ghetto

[Nothing]

With the release of the Strand DVD I was finally able to see this film, with a mounting sense of disappointment and frustration having enjoyed both of Apichatpong's previous films. Sang Sattawat is a masterfully composed exercise in whimsical nationalism. To briefly sum up the plot: the quirky, peaceful, romantic, spiritual Thai people are threatened by modern technology and urbanisation but, ultimately, the united strength of the Thai character wins out (whilst Weerasethakul has attempted to conjure up greater ambiguity, I believe this to be the underlying sentiment of the piece).

Comparisons to Tarkovsky's Mirror, invited by a humourous reference in what must be the film's most effective scene, are both lazy and unfounded. Tarkovsky's film displays an acute awareness of Russia's history and political complications whilst Weerasethakul's work is unfortunately as representative of a Bangkok elite subsumed in blinkered comforts and positivist art as the ironic banning of his film in Thailand is symptomatic of a military government fixated on ancient taboos and irrelevancies. Indeed, there is something almost pernicious in the way Weerasethakul fails entirely to address the increasingly vast and vicious class divide inherent within a rural/urban contrast that he places squarely at the centre of his film. If you try and reconcile the world of Syndromes with the recent Thai election result you will quickly come to realise that Weerasethakul's creation can only be approached as an act of fantasy.

For those less versed in Thai culture and politics, this is country in which the majority of the population are subsistence farmers who speak a form of Lao, not Thai, although you won't hear this language spoken in any of Apichatpong's films (or Pen-ek's, or...). These peasants have largely been left behind and/or exploited by a minority upper/upper-middle-class elite (from which Weerasethakul hails), their children often pushed into prostitution and petty gangsterism if they haven't already been stolen out of the paddy fields at a young age to be sold into sex slavery with the complicity of local police - and this is without even entering into the problems of the south, where thousands of lives have been claimed in an ongoing war between the government and muslim separatist movements . There is a huge sense of antagonism between the different groups in the country, as evidenced by the recent political troubles which can be followed with some degree of accuracy in the news.

One might argue that the film's formal attributes outweight any political objections. I might eventually come to sympathise with this view. The Ozu-esque composition is beautiful, as is the sense of pacing, the loose yet satisfying construction of the narrative, the lighting, the use of off-camera space. Nevertheless, as the controversies around Riefenstahl evidence, it is crucial to understand a work within its context and this is something that international viewers and critics are almost universally failing to do in this case. It is a most aggravating irony that Weerasethakul's film is being received as the work of a tenacious third-world artist struggling against the odds (indeed, Weerasethakul is able to access French public funding on precisely these grounds) when the reality is that the Bangkok elite have greater creature comforts than your average American family, with servants, drivers, giant BMWs, etc... None of which I would hold against the man if his work was a little more self-critical and honest.

Perhaps I shouldn't act surprised. Fantasy is a popular genre and Weerasethakul's brand will be especially appealing in western countries with class divisions of their own that they prefer to studiously ignore.

[John Cope]

I'm not sure I understand your argument. So the film fails because Joe does not address or seek to engage with a particular social reality that you deem as too significant to ignore? This reminds me of the pan for Sokurov's The Sun on the WSWS. That film, too, apparently, fails because it ignores a sociological dimension that (gasp) Sokurov seems indifferent to. I would argue the reviewer simply misses the point that the film is emphasizing something else entirely, a criteria to which the socioeconomic issues are placed in subordination. So, in other words...

One might argue that the film's formal attributes outweight any political objections.

Yes.

[Nothing]

It is true that Thailand's social problems are only softly touched upon in his previous two features, which was indeed a weakness although a minor one as the focus of the films was so contained. The greater problem with Syndromes is that the urban/rural divide is a major theme of the film and, yet, it is dealt with in such a horribly misrepresentative and smuggly dishonest manner.

At the centre of the film is an argument that the capitalist economic/technological explosion Thailand has been experiencing over the past 20-30 years has had little effect on the true character of its citizens, who continue to spend their time lightly musing over romance, spirituality and orchid cultivation. That the majority of the population have not been left behind, staring out in ragged plastic sandals from their devaluing paddy fields with a shocked and avaricious expression at the increasingly corpulent levels of consumer consumption enjoyed by their urban betters. The closest we get to a working-class character in Syndrome-world, aside from a couple of 'kooky' monks, is a man patronisingly portrayed as shirking on his responsibilities to repay a debt to the lady doctor. Plus a somewhat calous joke about unseen massage girls giving hand-jobs. But, really, who needs to waste time on such distasteful matters when the sight of the upper-middle-classes jogging and exercising to jaunty music in the royal botanical gardens is all the evidence we need of the health and strength of the nation.

Apichatpong is making political choices here that deserve a political response. A comparison to Riefenstahl's Olympia would be apt. Or, indeed, Dovzhenko's Earth. An inappropriate comparison would be to a film such as L'Avventura which, whilst very much focusing on the elite, is constantly aware of the wider social realities and never misses an opportunity to place its characters into sharp relief.

As for the rest of it. Well... If the art of cinema is simply about the bourgeois elite of one society creating pretty pictures to entertain the bourgeois elite of another then maybe we're all wasting our time here.

[portnoy]

Wow - you and I could not have more different feelings about this movie.

The notion that this movie's thematic interests extend into the explicitly political - or are, by some virtue of having been produced in a country with an appreciable sociopolitical divide, obligated to - is baffling to me. Weerasethakul's films are not intellectual/political treatises, but they're also not just 'pretty picture' formalist exercises 'to entertain the bourgeois elite' (could you be any more patronizing?) - they're daringly simple little pieces about lived experience - its rhythms, its beauties and uglinesses, and most of all its parallels and contrasts, and I think for all the parallels he does draw between lived experience in the rural and urban environments, the contrasts are clearly presented as far outweighing them - those massive exterior shots of that Corbu-nightmare of a hospital, that haunting, terrifying image of the gas being sucked through the intake vent.

There is, of course, a political dimension to any text, informed by the biases of its creators, the nature of its production, etc. etc. but to try to ascribe some sort of propagandistic intentionality to Weerasethakul's microscopic meditation on the developing love between his parents seems wrong. The Riefenstahl comparisons - which, frankly, are the most tired, lazy, belittlingly reductive shit in film criticism, a discursive reductio ad Hitlerum that should be permanently excised from any sort of reasoned argument - seem ridiculous in light of the artist's stated intentions and his own problems with censorship in his country. Given the conservative nature of the Thai film industry (where even Tony Jaa action flicks are moralistic, conservative treatises on the need to preserve religious and nationalist symbols - at all cost), the film seems to this viewer pretty radical.

The idea that, for example, the final sequence of public dance exercise is supposed to represent 'the health and strength of the nation' - I mean, get real. That sequence is drawn as a ridiculous, ersatz parallel to the concert at the end of the 'rural' segment of the film. If anything, this is one of the more politically incisive moments of the film, a look at the aesthetics of modern living - Weerasethakul uses the banality of the music and the exercise to interrogate modern urbanism, the way the rural - in the form of the park - is cartoonishly paraded into the city as a panacea for a devastated urban environment.

[John Cope]

As for the rest of it. Well... If the art of cinema is simply about the bourgeois elite of one society creating pretty pictures to entertain the bourgeois elite of another then maybe we're all wasting our time here.

As unfashionable as it is to say currently...

"Great Art is created by the few for the benefit of the few.”

[Nothing]

Let's be specific - I'm talking about Sang Sattawat, not the previous two films which I rather liked. That I expected more from AW is likely why I'm voicing off now. I wouldn't expect anything else, nor would I bother to comment, when it comes to Pen-ek and the rest of them. Actually, Pen-ek setting close to the entirety of his last film in an international-standard hotel suite beside the swanky new airport was almost perversely endearing...

I would take a guess that Apichatpong aligns himself more closely with the Democrats than with the old-fashioned generals who banned his film. I would also guess that he relishes the irony of an essentially patriotic film being banned because of an image of a monk playing the guitar. It makes his moderate-bourgeois-liberal point very well locally whilst raising his kudos abroad with the likes of yourself. It is a controversy he likely courted - the taboos of Thai cinema are well known, especially when monks are involved. And he was happy for the Thai censors to edit 18 minutes out of Blissfully Yours when it suited him. There is barely an audience for his work in Thailand anyway.

It seems we're in agreement that the film intends to pass comment on issues wider than its central romance, including the contrast between Thailand 'then' and 'now', between the rural and the urban. We disagree on whether the final images represent the mass. For myself, when you end a film with a large crowd of people from one ethnic group involved in a united action, it is hard not to draw such a reading. More crucially, whilst you feel that the contrasts of life in Thailand are adequately represented by the 'cartoonish' irony of a park imported into an urban environment (isn't, uh, that what a park is?), or the 'terrifying' image of gas being sucked into a vent, it is my feeling that these give a truly paltry reading on the scale of ugly. "Look what we're doing for our feng shui..." says Joe. But what about all those people over there? You know, the ones who speak that other language? The ones who can't afford to shop in Central mall? The ones whose first budding romance probably involved a local policeman at the age of 12? "Oh, what, those people? Oh, I didn't notice them. They're not important..."

If, to take a slightly more extreme example, I said that it was bad taste to make a mass-market romantic comedy about a couple on holiday in Darfur... would I then find you in agreement? If so, then where is the line drawn exactly?

For the record, I find feel-good American crap such as Juno just as offensive.

"Great Art is created by the few for the benefit of the few.”

Perhaps so, but what makes great art? And how are the few elected?

You know, why can't we just say that you both enjoyed the light-hearted whimsy and formal accomplishment of the film and you don't really care whether or not it bares any relationship whatsoever to social or political realities and leave it at that?

[chaddoli]

You know, why can't we just say that you both enjoyed the light-hearted whimsy and formal accomplishment of the film and you don't really care whether or not it bares any relationship whatsoever to social or political realities and leave it at that?

Speaking for myself, a great admirer of this film, it isn't that I don't care about it's social and political ramifications necessarily, it's that I am completely ignorant of them. It brings up an interesting point about criticism actually: if you dislike a film for reasons that I'm ignorant of, how do we reconcile our opinions? Does being more knowledgeable about a film's subject, context, etc. render one's opinion more valid?

I'm not criticizing you, Nothing. Your thoughts on the film were very educational for me even though they didn't change my opinion on the film one bit. I'm just wondering if you could elaborate on your frustration about the Westerners embracing this film. However, you should know that even though it appeared on several top ten lists, the film only made $60,000 worldwide. "Especially appealing" it is not.

[Nothing]

I find that figure hard to believe. Even a limited release in one of the larger European countries would yield far higher takings than that, especially considering how lauded the film has been by critics. A European television sale would be many times that figure again. But...

Anyway, it is not the point of arthouse cinema to make money these days. Modern audiences make that near-impossible. Rather, the films are funded by a conglomeration of public funds that no-one minds seeing the back of. For example, the Danish Film Insititute takes last position on most of Zentropa's output and they have something like a 0.01% recoupment rate. Thus, AW has no cause to worry whatever the takings are (and I would imagine his fee alone was quite a bit larger than the figure you state).