The cicadas hum. The bedside lights cycle through a soft neon pulse of red, then blue, then yellow, then green. Slowly. The majority of the occupants of the makeshift military hospital in Khon Kaen, Thailand, are asleep. They are being tended to in their slumber by middle-aged housewife Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) in Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s latest film, CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR, competing in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
Jenjira is told by Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a mystic co-worker, that these soldiers will never wake up. Their beds lie on top of an ancient cemetery from a long-forgotten monastic dynasty, and the ghosts are feeding on the energy from the sleeping soldiers. Suddenly the composure of the shot, with the soldier’s beds uniformly arranged along both edges of the room, takes on a double meaning. Yes, it could be a makeshift hospital ward, but look closely, and with a bit of imagination it could also be some sort of tomb.
CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR is Weerasethakul’s divine bangarang offering to cinema audiences…
Where have the soldiers come from? Are they casualities of the recent Cambodian-Thai border dispute? Have they been digging up the hospital grounds to lay fibre-optic telecommunications cable? Or have they all been polishing their superior’s boots so much in the heat that they’ve collapsed with fatigue? Weerasethakul doesn’t give any concrete answers as to the cause of their unconsciousness, but it’s a mark of credit to the director that the ambiguity to the film is allowed to grow and develop its own narrative thread. Jenjira is out of step with her surroundings, both literally and metaphorically. One of her legs is disfigured to the extent that she is missing an inch or two and is forced to wear what looks like a Thai clog to balance. As the film progresses, and she has managed to wake up one of the soldiers, Itt (Banlip Lomnoi), she seems to flit between an invisible spiritual world and contemporary Thailand – although the camera work from cinematographer Garcia Diego is naturalistic in its depictions, there’s a look in Jenjira’s eyes that she’s not totally on this spiritual plane, after a visit from the ghosts of two Laotian princesses she was praying to in the previous scene.
There’s a scene in Stephen Spielberg’s HOOK where middle-aged Peter Pan is invited along for a meal with the Lost Boys. What we, the audience, see at first is an empty table, but we know the Lost Boys can see food because they have opened their eyes to some sort of spiritual, make-believe fun that can only exist in Neverland. It takes Peter a while to see the food, but when he does… bangarang! CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR is Weerasethakul’s divine bangarang offering to cinema audiences. The ghostly architecture and phantasmagorical people that haunt Jenjira’s corner of Thailand are there for all to see, but only if you believe they are. That’s the beauty of the latest offering from the director of UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES: everything is there for you to find, it’s just hidden in plain sight.