User Reviews

Weerasethakul's films always grow on me; I keep thinking about them long after I've seen them, and Cemetery is no exception.

Its his most restrained, most suggestive and most self-reflexive, almost to the point of hyper-reality. We never see the ghosts or spirits that appear in his previous films, instead the gods appear in the flesh. In one scene, we see two young women come up to Jenjira, our main protagonist, and after talking for a bit she realizes they are the gods she was praying to earlier. In another instance, after a sleeping soldier's "personality" is transferred to the body of a psychic girl, he/she shows Jenjira the place of the palace, which we see is actually a public park with statues about. The royal bathroom is a layer of leaves on the ground.

Jenjira is an older woman with a disabled leg and no children of her own. She becomes attached to one particular soldier in the corner of the school room, who suffers from a form of sleeping sickness. Since no family visits him, she stays by his side as if she was his own mother.

In their first meeting, the psychic girl tells Jenjira about her abilities; how she is able to tell the soldiers relatives what they're up to in their sleeping lives. She also tells Jenjira how, in her own past life, she was a boy who fell from a tree and died. This is the same story in "Syndromes and a Century", where the dentist tells the story of his brother who fell and died from climbing a tree. These stories seem to repeat themselves for Joe, (the director's nickname), as he himself has said, its a story that he keeps hearing in this same village. The psychic girl tells Jenjira to open her eyes wide, as if all the strangeness and otherworldly things are all visible in the real world if we look hard enough.

The somnambulist pacing of the film reflects the atmosphere of the sleeping soldiers in this small Thai village. The fans in the schoolroom, the propellers in the water, the beautiful neon glow of the machines that help the soldiers have better dreams, we watch as they slowly change color. Its as if Joe is hypnotizing us as well.

In a surreal scene, Jenjira and the soldier, Itt, are at the cinemas watching a film that is the total opposite of Cemetery; full of explosions, b-grade special effects and fast action. The angle is from behind, with part of the film in frame. It instantly reminded me of Rene Magritte's painting "Not to be Reproduced" (La Reproduction interdite, 1937). We are watching a film, watching them watch a film. After the film ends, the audience members stand up waiting for something. They wait for what seems like an absurd amount of time, as if they were standing up asleep. (They are actually waiting for the King's Anthem, but it never arrives.) A hint of political criticism.

Despite all the subtle layers intricately embedded in his films, sometimes I think Joe just wants to promote good health and happiness. We see people exercising in the public park, similar to the enigmatic ending of "Syndromes and a Century", albeit this time to more laid back music provided by DJ Soulscape. He is always able to capture a specific time and place while at the same time referencing past lives, as if both co-exist.

If this is the first film you have seen from him, it may be difficult to access, but fans of his previous work will enjoy this more subtle, but nonetheless, absorbing film.

Such a beautiful film visually, but also because of it's humanity and compassion.

From the opening scene, which is not a scene at all but a blank screen with no sound for over a minute, then there is sound, then there is light - an extremely mundane scene in an ordinary but beautiful landscape, our senses and conceptions are being manipulated and influenced. The opening frames the most basic theme in the movie to me: sound. For so much of the movie there is no dialogue but sound. Sight and sound: the natural ambient sound of whatever environment is being depicted at the moment. Your sub or subtle consciousness is constantly invited out.

The beauty, aura, serenity and power of the mundane, even to the "ordinariness" of the people inhabiting this commonplace realm of dirt, backhoes, work, chickens, weeds, children, parks, shrines, struggle, etc ... , penetrates. The juxtaposition and contradiction of the surreal sleeping soldiers and the world of Kings and Emperors at war they inhabit as they sleep, highlight the depth of the day to day ordinary. Here, the commonplace is just lived, with longing and bewilderment, automatically deferring to the greatness of that other world in the numerous ways it manifests, but more majestic and profound than anything the other-world has to offer. I guess it's not too profound to observe the symbolism of the soldiers living in a dreamworld of exalted beings and affairs, but asleep in this one.

The emphasis on the senses, ambiance, atmosphere stays with you. When I left the theater, I stood in front for at least 30 minutes not walking or talking, but just observing the world anew, but especially 'listening.' It was like coming out of a week long silent meditation retreat where one's senses are so highly attuned and all the gates of perception seem open and new.

The everyday people of the world depicted here are sad, and see themselves as insignificant and lowly. And, it's sad they don't realize, as this movie shows us, they are everything!

Round and round and round they go, the ceiling fans and pond aerators, like the dharmachakra wheel of the Buddha's law. Herself reborn from a previous life she remembers, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) travels back and forth between here and the spirit world, effortlessly. And vice-versa: two goddesses enter the material world from the spirit one to drop by a cafe and chat with Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), one of their devotees, not forgetting to slip in a pitch for a skin cream. People enter a waterside park framed by a mostly stationary camera, where they sit at chairs for a few moments before suddenly getting up and walking out of the picture, their places soon taken by others, as if to hint at the ephemeral and cyclic nature of human existence. The past and the present coexist, and the macro- and microcosms meet as protozoa collide with clouds. Everything is interconnected and inter-affected in the Indra's net of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's cinema.

Sleeping and waking are, of course, another cycle. But in the village of Khon Kaen, this one has been disrupted among soldiers working in a construction project that happens to be sited over the tombs of ancient kings. Keng tells Jen that the souls of these kings have enlisted those of the soldiers in their fight by "sucking up all their energy" (in the Japanese subtitles) and using it to fuel their forces in the underworld battle. Hence the soldiers are left unconscious and in apparent sleep for days on end, sporadically waking for short spells. Hmmm.

Despite the daydream flux (and sometimes somniferous effect) of his cinematography, this and other metaphors sprinkled into the mix by Weerasethakul in "Cemetery of Splendour" (the Thai title translates "Love in Khon Kaen," I'm told) have a wry and topical bite. In one initially baffling scene, the audience at a movie suddenly stand bolt upright and at attention, their eyes glued to the unseen screen. But why? It turns out that it is proper for them to do so when the "Royal Anthem" song extolling the Thai royal family is played (generally before movies) in theaters. But I understand that the anthem and accompanying footage are not allowed to be included within any movies of a merely entertaining nature. Thus we have the strange silence and only the blank faces of the members of the audience reacting to the footage in this, an "entertainment" movie. A little dig.

As the audience leave the theater and ride the escalators down to the exit in a movie complex, we see others riding the up escalators on the opposite sides of the atrium separating them. Shot from the top of the atrium looking straight down, the four banks of escalators form a squarish revolving wheel peopled with moviegoers, spinning round and round, until the giant metallic chakra slowly fades into the hospital room where the soldiers are fast asleep, thereby fusing the two in our minds. Who are the real sleepers? Aren't we all asleep?

In a 2016 interview with the Japanese art magazine "Bitecho," Weerasethakul expressed apprehensions about the course of his country and worries about its people, who he was afraid were "blindly" moving into the future. This statement clearly resonates with the admonition made to Jen toward the film's very end: open your eyes.

I like where Weerasethakul is trying to take us with his cinema, and this intriguing blend of the pointed and the dreamlike would have received a higher rating from this reviewer if only all had come together a bit better.

I love it when a film comes along that changes the perceptions of how a story should be told. Apart from being entertaining in its own right, it shakes up (to a limited extent) the tired, tried and tested mainstream diet of CGI, diluted scares and catwalk model actors with identi-kit personalities. 'Cemetery of Splendor' couldn't be further than that style of blandness. And yet in rejecting everything stale about traditional storytelling, it sadly creates a blandness all its own.

A school in Northern Thailand has been turned into a makeshift hospital to house soldiers who have been afflicted by an unexplained sleeping sickness, which renders them comatose for vast periods of time, punctuated by periods of awakening.

Volunteer Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas) strikes up a friendship with patient Itt (Banlob Lomnoi) during his few hours of wakefulness. There is speculation that the school was built over a cemetery and the dead are feeding off the minds of the sleeping soldiers. Jenjira also becomes friendly with Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), who claims to have some rapport with the sleepers.

That is about all as far as a story is concerned, and it is stretched far, far beyond interest to fill the 2 hour running time. The frustration I felt watching is that anything else dramatic was not likely to occur grew the further in I ventured. There's no need for scenes of so little happening to last so long, one after the other. All these elongated moments are deliberate artistic decisions, and so cannot be brushed away by budgetary or lack-of-time reasons. And the film has attracted a mass of critical acclaim – so clearly, I just didn't 'get' it.

The camera is primarily static. People wander in and out of shot just as they would in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Sometimes you only see the back of a character's head throughout the scene. In true documentary style, the acting is very naturalistic and the characters very believable. While I would commend director/writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul for refusing to utilise anything traditional about this project, and am glad his work has attracted the commendations of critics, this is so uncommercial, it is sadly deeply un-enthralling.

When watching Cemetery of Splendour or any of Weerasethakul's films one needs to recall Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" because any fraught attempts to find out "what it means" is pointless and can only diminish the work. For the first time since Andrei Tarkovsky's death has a director so keenly picked up on Tarkovsky's views of what film could and should be and begun to carry the torch, making each Weerasethakul film a treasure, because it is all about the poetic experience and the boundless possibility of the cinema: film as dream, film as memory, film as history, film as life and most importantly film as a spiritual and seamless transitory mixture of all of the above. His images stick with you for a lifetime. His films roll with associations and pure natural beauty fixating the filmic experience as memories of a collective past, near or distant. He scrapes the subconscious mind, brings the viewer into a sublime world of the surreal, the magical, while managing to remain rooted in reality, and at times in the mundane leisure of a slow-paced life that flows like the Mekong River, a place that Weerasethakul finds himself time and time again.

Cemetery of Splendour takes place near the Mekong in Khon Kaen, Thailand, in which Thai soldiers find themselves in an old rural hospital that once functioned as a school, beset by a mysterious supernatural-like sleeping disorder where they sleep nearly non-stop in small cots day and night, occasionally waking up. Nurses and volunteers sit by their besides, talk to them, wash them, etc. The cots are all connected to a series of long curved incandescent tubes that glow gloriously, pulsating vibrant colors from green to red and red to blue and back to green, captured beautifully by Weerasethakul's camera. Outside the government is digging up ground with the rumored intention of relocating the hospital. Children play in the dirt mounds and life happens. These are the parts of Weerasethakul's films that there is no need to explain. It adds dimension to the life that is taking place within the film. It is past, present and future overlapping one another.

One of the volunteers is Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner a Weerasethakul regular), a woman that walks with crutches, one leg longer than the other. Jen helps one of the soldiers in particular, a soldier by the name of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi). Something draws her to this boy, maybe because his bed is where her desk once sat years earlier when she attended school there. Weerasethakul is constantly doing this in nearly all of his work, he has an impeccable ability to leave the temporal and spatial planes of existence undefined, allowing them to flow into and through one another whenever the need arises. She states early in the film that she feels as if she had become "synchronized" with the soldiers, a bad sleeper she is sleeping easier now that she is back in Khon Kaen, as if the "soldiers are sleeping for her." She begins to feel that Itt is the son she never had. The scenes in which she bathes him have a beautiful and careful intimacy reminiscent of Camera's nurse character bathing Alicia in Talk to Her. Itt begins to wake up. They take walks, talk intimately about their lives, eat and just as suddenly as he awakes he can fall back to sleep. There is a very interesting character who Jen also befriends rather quickly by the name of Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) a medium who can see into the soldiers past lives while they are sleeping and can communicate with the soldiers in their dreams (and possibly bridge reality and dream between characters). The mood of accepting a ghostly history runs through Cemtery like veins, Weerasethakul blends the supernatural with conservative realism more matter-of-factly than possibly any director before. Jen is a pious woman who takes animal statuettes (that illicit the power of various prayers) to a temple where she goes to pray to two Laotian goddesses. We see her do this with her American husband—Jen's real life husband as well, a way for Weerasethakul to mix fiction and reality—and in the next seen we find Jen in the park eating a snack approached by two women who think her for the animal statuettes that she honored them with. The two women claim to be the long dead Laotian princesses (turned goddesses) that Jen prays to daily, yet the scene takes plays like any other daily meeting; it is this spatial and temporal convergence that marks Weerasethakul's work and only continues to build throughout Cemetery of Splendour. The goddesses also relate to Jen that the improvised hospital is buried on an ancient cemetery for kings and soldiers who continue to do battle without the constraints of life as we know it or time as we know it and they drain the energy from the soldiers which is why the soldiers can never get better. In a place where death, life, past and present are so active one cannot escape the past, for better or for worse; these are the staples of Weerasethakul's world, with the message that says, you might as well embrace the sublimity of it all, because we are surrounded by the ghosts of everything that has come before and will become ghosts as well.

I didn't vote for this movie with a lots of scores since it's not a movie suitable for all the people. I didn't mean there are some limited level stuff, but just not all the people can understand or just have the patience to understand the materials and the message this movie would want us to see. Well, frankly speaking, for this director, this movie is already easy and simple enough. Because this director really enjoy to tell a story in this kind of way and created an atmosphere mixed with both mystery and holy stuff. I think there just one part I would like to say and hope it is not count as spoiler. At the end of the movie , when the Keng and the old lady sit on the chair and Kend was licking her leg. My understanding about that is the spirit of the lady is already gone , which replaced by the Keng's spirit. And Keng's body is filled by the spirit of the man laying on the bed. They have some love issues with each other an that is why they are licking each other. That is just my perspective, hope people could understand and just take that as a comments .