Sydney Film Festival Review: Cemetery of Splendour

Jenjira Pongpas Widner in Cemetery of Splendour

In director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's followup to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, time slows down to a pause.  Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas) is a handicapped volunteer working in a makeshift hospice for a group of soldiers who have mysteriously drifted into a comatose state. When one named Itt (Banlop Lomnoi) rises back to life, they begin a series of conversations and his presence awakens a dormant part of her soul she had assumed had curled into a ball and died.  Jenjira is a smart, worldly woman with a good sense of humor. She takes each day by moments, disarming the viewer of whatever pain or suffering she may harbor.  She is no one's burden, and the beauty is her discovery of all the anguish she had holed up inside her.  Pongpas is an absolute delight to watch and grounds the story with her unassuming yet profound performance.  Her catharsis is supported by a greatly appreciated subtext that serves as an undercurrent through the running length of the film.  Instead of providing a story, Weerasethakul invites the audience to find it themselves.  The expression "show don't tell" is adhered to on some level and then disregarded rather appropriately on a whole other plain.  

There are plenty of unanswered questions on first glance, such as a scene in a movie theater where the audience stands for a minute and stares at the screen in a silent communion.  But there is a strange beauty to its inexplicability. It's followed by a geometrically striking shot involving a bird's eye view of crisscrossing escalators superimposed upon tranquil iridescent fluorescent lights that stick into the air from the ground alongside each cot in the infirmary.  There's a personality to that stillness that is reminiscent of the monoliths in 2001, suggestive of a link between reality and another dimension of beings that can't be recognized through our senses.  They're posts watching over the soldiers serving as some kind of incubator to the nether world.  

Their leisurely fluctuating colors provide more movement than the camera.  Of what little motion there is, it is slight and hushed.  As we ease into a place where time stands still, we're also slowly invited into a fantastical world where fabled figures come to life and mediums serve as a guide into a mythical kingdom that only the characters can see.  The movie trades on royalty and lore, feeding the imagination of the protagonist. When Jenjira first learns that things are not what they seem, it's one of the freshest stripped down scenes I've seen in a while. As well, her emotional release in the climax quite poignantly brings things full circle.  Here, patience is a virtue and rewarded in measured, but satisfying amounts.