A second: children follow a dog around the dirt streets of a village. They clip an empty can to the animal's neck and watch as the canine takes flight in a wail of terror and confusion. The children give chase, laughing.
Where do these glimpses of Thai life fit into the beguiling soup of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)?
Shot over the course of two years in Bangkok and the countryside with a skeleton crew, Mysterious Object at Noon takes the story of a teacher and her disabled student and gradually, unsteadily builds upon it, as Weerasethakul turns his camera on people across Thailand to continue the tale. Some add small details--the teacher goes to the market on the weekend, schedules to have her hair done and takes her ailing and stubborn father to a doctor's appointment; others, however, hurl the story into the fantastical: the teacher gives birth to an alien boy while in a coma, wait, No, another story contributor interrupts--the teacher is an alien!--until the fairly normal thread grows so knotted and confused that is becomes phantasmagoric by the end of the film, eventually tapering off into the hazy mist of the Thai mountains like a whisper in the night.
Those familiar with Weerasethakul's later films--Tropical Malady (2004), Syndromes and a Century (2006) or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2012), the latter perhaps his most internationally renowned--will glimpse the early roots of his style and sensibility within these frames. Mysterious Object at Noon is shot in a grainy 16mm black-and-white, rendering shadows as inky pools and exteriors as blown-out distortions of no-space, giving the entire film the dreamlike impression inherent in memory. In the interview accompanying the World Cinema Project's restoration print, Weerasethakul explains that Thailand is a world of color. To see it through black-and-white is to see it as through sleep, another one of the director's obsessions and the focus of 2015's Cemetery of Splendor, which finds a nurse tending to soldiers who have fallen under a "sleeping sickness" and journey through a world of dreams.
But this isn't a dream world with the fantastical set pieces of a Hollywood picture or the gloomy horror of a Lynchian nightmare. The sequences of "fiction" and "nonfiction" become almost indistinguishable. At some points the film crew enters the frame, and Weerasethakul's gentle voice drifts from offscreen, asking for a retake of a shot. A boom mic dips into the frame, and then the sound man himself enters to take lunch. The lines between reality and the world of the film blend. But to restrict the work to those demarcations isn't correct. Even Weerasethakul avoids relying on these terms.
Rather, his technique pulls the pieces together like a needle mending a hole, allowing viewers to surrender and drift across the Thai landscape on railroad tracks, dusty roads and crowded waterways to an unknown, possibly nonexistent destination. Perhaps a key to the film is the director's fascination with the "exquisite corpse" concept, whereby someone begins an illustration, and others contribute their own pieces and parts.
Despite his insistence on erasing the idea of singular authorship, Weerasethakul (or simply "Joe" to Western audiences) has become synonymous with his national cinema and has brought Thailand to the forefront of international moviemaking. His filmic language is one of long takes and static shots, emphasizing journeys, landscapes and the people within both - a fascination shared with the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, another master of slow cinema.
At the end of its oddly quick hour and a half run-time, Mysterious Object at Noon leaves one feeling slightly out of touch with the present, glancing around the room to wonder what's real and what's not. Is anything answered? Did the story resolve itself? Maybe not. But then again, does a story truly end or does it continue to forever unravel and transform, twisting over and upon itself as it passes through the planes of memory?
by Thomas Davant
