Haunted Jukebox

Have you ever left a movie in a daze, almost as if your entire world has shifted? Skyway Cinemas, one of many 1970s-built multiplexes I frequented in my childhood was unremarkable apart from its spacious lobby framed by large glass windows directly across from its three (and later, six) auditoriums. My parents and I often saw matinees there: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Arachnophobia and the Back To The Future movies, among others. Often, stumbling out of the darkened rooms meant emerging into a phalanx of blinding sunlight, as if to say, “Welcome back to the real world.” We’d pass through the lobby and out the front entrance, blinking our eyes, left to reconcile such an abrupt change in our surroundings.

I rarely experience this exact sensation anymore as neither the classic art-deco cinemas and funky non-profit arthouses nor the multistory, contemporary multiplexes offer this walking transition between subterranean dark and invasive light. However, that’s not to say I don’t ever feel utterly transformed after watching a film. We all see movies we like to varying degrees, but once in a great while, this feeling goes so far beyond a matter of simply enjoying it. Whenever recounting my decision to study film, I used to claim that this pursuit did nothing less than change the way I perceive the world; as I’ve aged, I’ve also added that watching films critically has at times also fundamentally altered the way I see myself. Naturally, there’s no substitute for real life experience, but at its best, cinema (like all arts) can serve as a way of learning, an act of discovery and a tool for both empathy and self-growth.

In one sense or another, each entry in this project zeroes in on a film that achieved at least one and often all three of those ideals, albeit to varying degrees. I’ve written about how the radical, stark ending of Safe shook me to the core and the epiphany of ongoing connections and circularity concluding What Time Is It There?, but other titles had subtler impacts: the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal of what’s really going on in Stories We Tell, the matter-of-fact imagery All That Jazz dutifully, almost brutally goes out on, the haunting, frozen-in-time tableaux providing Edward II with its final grace note. All of these are resolutions I had to take time to absorb and ponder, not so much jump cuts from black to white as sifting through thousands of shades of gray, acknowledging and gradually feeling something incisive and lingering about what I had seen.

Somewhere between those two reactions is one of what I can best describe as a sort of transfiguration. Deeper and less defined than a purely emotional or intellectual response, it veers towards the spiritual, as if witnessing something has placed one in an altered, previously inconceivable state of mind. It’s awfully tricky to describe, for signifiers such as “hypnotic”, “trancelike” and “otherworldly” come off as too subjective or abstract to adequately communicate what it’s actually like to another person. A particular film may affect me so strongly while leaving another viewer cold and unmoved. The critic’s role is to make a case (or not) for how and why a film has this power; naturally, it’s a hell of a thing to fully articulate. Take Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical sci-fi feature Stalker, which I first saw at age 22 in film school. It left me baffled, not comprehending what story it was trying to tell or why it even attempted it in the first place. I soon watched the Russian director’s other works (there’s only seven features in all) and responded to them all differently (some gut-quick assessments: liked Andrei Rublev, hated Nostalghia, kept dozing off during Mirror.)

Twenty years later, I revisited Stalker, this time at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square on a hot summer’s afternoon. Sometime before that I had read Zona, Geoff Dyer’s unconventional book about the film (written from an average viewer’s perspective rather than a film critic’s), encouraging me to give it another shot. Perhaps because I was watching it for pleasure instead of coursework or simply two decades older and more receptive to its idiosyncrasies, Stalker confounded less and intrigued more on this viewing. Although I surely moved around in my seat often during the last half-hour of its 163-minute running time, as I arose and made my way to exit, I felt woozy but satiated as if emerging from a deep sleep. I thought this is possibly what the concept of enlightenment is supposed to be like, even if Stalker asks far more questions than it even pretends to answer. The brightness of late afternoon brought me back into the real world, but only partially—I walked around the neighborhood in a slight trance, retaining what I had just experienced in ways that only this particular film’s moods and ideas could influence and shape.

This particular reaction I had with my rewatch of Stalker is not limited to that film alone but it is uncommon (imagine if every movie one watched left one so off-kilter!) In this category, I’d place 21^st century titles as disparate as Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Celine Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and many of Paul Thomas Anderson’s later works (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread.) The common signifier among all of them? I exited each film indisputably changed as if allowed a peek into how another person views the world and makes it their own whether through its ultra-specific rhythms and visual or narrative choices or via something recognizable that nonetheless contains other facets rendering it both somewhat familiar and fresh.

I often experience this sensation with the films of Thai New Wave director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who often goes by the simple nickname “Joe” (which, no matter how silly or reductive it sounds, I will use going forward for brevity’s sake.) As with Tarkovsky, I admire his features to varying degrees. His 2000 debut, Mysterious Object at Noon has a fascinating premise—unscripted, it travels across Thailand, interviewing people and imploring them to add their own words to an ongoing story, “exquisite corpse” style in which each new person is only allowed to see the ending of what the previous one had written. However, it’s less effective in practice as the momentum lags rather than builds, more or less petering out midway through. Thankfully, this doesn’t occur on subsequent efforts Blissfully Yours (2003), Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006) even as each one utilizes a nontraditional diptych structure to different ends. The best of them, Tropical Malady radically transforms at its exact midpoint from a slice-of-life, near-romantic comedy into an experimental, spiritual folk tale. I first saw it with a friend (at the same place I rewatched Stalker) and the ending left us somewhat like that of Cache, fumbling for words to describe and elaborate upon what we had just seen.

I feel similarly about most of Joe’s endings but it’s a credit to his growth as a filmmaker that with each subsequent work, it’s more of an attribute than a negative. While Syndromes and a Century, a near-essay on his parents’ profession as doctors has one of the more incongruous endings I’ve encountered, his breakthrough, 2010 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives signs off with a deftly deployed twist that begs one to reconsider everything they’ve just seen. It’s in line with the film’s entire tone, a playful, poetic rumination on death and how life itself isn’t necessarily so linear, mixing fantasy and reality together so fluidly that one comes to view both as interchangeable while still recognizing the former’s otherworldliness. It’s not so much more accessible than it is a masterful culmination of a singular aesthetic developed and fine-honed—the perfect place to start with Joe’s filmography, perhaps.

His next major work, 2015’s Cemetery of Splendour is more suited to advanced Joe scholars/admirers (as is 2012’s Mekong Hotel, a 61-minute piece that played festivals and was mostly seen as a bonus feature on the Uncle Boonmee DVD release.) First watching it in its 2016 American theatrical release at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, it affected me in a way similar to how Stalker would a year later, only this feeling emerged about three-quarters of the way through the film. It was on extended shot of sun piercing through fluffy white clouds in the sky—or so I thought, until what resembled a leaf (or maybe some sort of organism?) floated into the frame, revealing that this image might actually reflect the sky on a body of water. Out of context, such imagery is unremarkable but appearing as it does within the meditative, meandering rhythms established within the preceding 90 minutes, it connected with me in a profound, if inexplicable way. Again, I don’t know if this was Joe’s intention, or whether it had a similar effect on most other viewers but I felt a rush of emotions—excitement at the reveal, peace from the soothing tone, an epiphany that life may be more than it initially appears. As the film continued, I applied these feelings both to what I was witnessing unfold and also to all that had come before.

Filmed in Khon Kaen, Joe’s hometown in the northeast Thai region of Isan, Cemetery of Splendour is mostly set at a defunct elementary school turned makeshift hospital for convalescing soldiers. Middle-aged Jen (Joe regular Jenjira Pongpas) is visiting a friend who works there as a nurse. Jen now lives in Bangkok with her American husband Richard but grew up in this rural enclave and even attended this very school. Jen herself is disabled, one of her legs significantly shorter than the other (she walks with a cane.) The patients, however, are all afflicted by what is only referred to as a “sleeping sickness”. Much of the film occurs in a former classroom with a dozen of them laid out in beds, two rows of six on each side, all the windows open wide to let in the tropical air and nature sounds. The men are not exactly comatose, but not all that far off—they sleep day and night and on the rare occasion when awake, we see more than one of them overcome by narcolepsy, abruptly dozing off in mid-sentence or mid-bite in the dining hall. No explanation is given for this malady, only that it’s happening exclusively to the country’s servicemen.

Enter Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a young medium who works for the FBI. Known for her ability to contact the spirits of murder victims and missing persons, she’s at the hospital to sit with the sleeping soldiers (and occasionally, their wives) and perform psychic readings in order to understand their thoughts and dreams while in their unconscious states. Jen befriends both Keng as well as Itt (Banlop Lomnoi, another Joe regular), one of the younger, handsomer patients. Her burgeoning connection with the latter is motherly rather than sensual, but soon transcends such parameters: “It’s as if I’m synchronizing with that soldier, or he’s sleeping through me,” she says aloud at one point. As Jen spends more time bonding with both the psychic and this soldier, she herself enters altered, supernatural states of mind, rendered by Joe matter-of-factly, stressing both halves of the term “magical realism” as he tends to do in his work. One such example: not long after visiting a Buddhist shrine with Richard, Jen herself is visited in the nearby park by two women who casually reveal themselves as living embodiments of the princesses the shrine saluted in statue form. “Both of us are dead as well,” they tell Jen before leaving her with this wisdom: “Those soldiers will never recover.”

Cemetery of Splendour gently tempers such fantasy elements with a naturalism informed by an immersive sense of place. The elaborate sound design favors environmental ambience over anything that’s produced although music occasionally surfaces—most notably during two sequences of people performing aerobics (an odd but insistent motif in Joe’s work along with hospital settings, for that matter.) Images such as a water wheel irrigation apparatus in the neighboring lake or the hospital room’s ceiling fans reappear throughout, adding texture rather than concrete meaning. Dialogue, however, is just as central an element in stressing the film’s realism. It often sounds unrehearsed, conversational, banal, even, but it grounds one in the moment, and the moment is key for it prevents Joe’s fascination with ghost stories and all that is unknowable from drifting out of focus—in other words, the fantastical becomes relatable.

Still, an unknowable awe retains presence. Arguably the film’s most striking visual construct appears about a half-hour in with the installation a series of tall, narrow, curving neon light tubes at the head of each patient’s bed. Connected to each man by a face breathing mask, they’re meant to serve as a form of therapy, aiding with nightmares and snoring (“Americans used them in Afghanistan”, a doctor notes.) Occasionally, the light in these tubes is a pure, neutral hue; other times, it changes colors, from red to blue to green to white, the light gradually, almost lethargically surging vertically from bottom to top. No further scientific explanation is offered for these tubes, but it’s an image Joe returns to throughout the film, often after dark when the alternately cool and warm colors are exclusively illuminating the room. It’s hypnotic, presumably for the patients but also the viewer—beautifully meditative and a respite from all the conversation transpiring during the day.

The tubes also play a role in one of the film’s key sequences. In a rare instance where Itt is fully awake, he and Jen leave the hospital for an evening trip into the city: dinner at a street market and a movie (we only see them watching a trailer for an over-the-top, CGI-heavy action/horror epic—the antithesis of Joe’s style.) After the trailer ends, as seen in silhouette, Jen, Itt and the rest of the audience stand up in the dark, silent, still staring at the screen as if in a trance (much like the viewer of one of Joe’s films, perhaps.) Everyone then leaves the theater in what appears to be a modern multiplex, walking towards a sea of escalators that will take them back to the outside world. There’s no score, only diegetic sound but as patrons get on the escalators, some familiar, slowly changing colors appear. They’re from neon lights in the building’s interior design. Soon, we also see a recognizable ceiling fan as part of an exceedingly slow crossfade. The escalator riders are still visible, but the hospital room with the glowing neon tubes also comes into focus.

This crossfade endures for at least a minute; it’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen in a film. In trying to determine why Joe included it here, I have no definite answers apart from him suggesting this idea of worlds coalescing: the awake cinema patrons and the sleeping soldiers co-exist, after all, with the former arguably in just as much of a fugue state as the latter. Like many sequences in Stalker, it goes on longer than it needs to (personally, I never wanted it to end), but long enough for it resonate by inviting the viewer into this combined fugue state—the mundaneness of everyday life (leaving a movie theater) with the world of the subconscious. Jen herself latter experiences her own fugue state as a sleeping Itt communicates with her through the medium Keng. Jen tells him, “I think I’m dreaming, Itt; I just want to wake up.” This occurs right before the reflection-of-sky-on-water-reveal, itself perhaps encouraging viewers to arrive at the same conclusion.

Later, Jen is back in the makeshift hospital room besides Itt as he lies in bed. She says to him, “Suddenly, I can read your mind. I have seen your dream.” “And I can see yours,” Itt responds. Some kind of transfiguration has occurred between them. Cemetery of Splendour doesn’t offer any logical explanation for this act because none exists (something similar occurs in his next feature, 2021’s Memoria, filmed in Colombia (!) and starring Tilda Swinton (!!)). The closest cinema can do is put the viewer in a mind state attempting to express what the experience of transfiguration might be like. The final scene is of Jen sitting on a park bench outside the hospital, watching a large dump truck digging a massive hole in the ground (the image of which opened the film.) We’re never told exactly why the truck is there (it’s speculated they’re digging to install fiber optic cables) but its presence and purpose is related to talk of the makeshift hospital’s imminent closure and tearing down. In the distance, an outdoor aerobics class performs to a jaunty instrumental slightly tinged with melancholy. In the last shot, we see only Jen, eyes wide open, still watching the truck but now framed as if she was staring directly at us. She’s been through something over the course of the film, and so have we.

Essay #22 of 24 Frames

Go back to #21: The Duke of Burgundy.

Go ahead to #23: Ham On Rye