Cemetery of Splendor (2016)

Let's be realistic.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It was initially the synopsis of the movie that made me give "Cemetery of Splendor" (aka "Rak ti Khon Kaen") a chance and sat down to watch it, plus the fact that it is a Thai movie - as I do enjoy Asian cinema quite a lot."Cemetery of Splendor" is a rather slow paced movie, and there is very little happening, so it becomes a rather tiresome affair to keep focus on the movie and it is a struggle to have the interest maintained on the storyline. And running at two hours, then your will to continue will be challenged to its limits. I found myself checking the time stamp of the progress of the movie frequently because it felt like an eternity of getting nowhere in the movie. I managed to get almost halfway through the movie before I gave up out of complete and utter hopelessness and boredom.The characters in the movie seemed fairly one-dimensional and were lacking personalities and outstanding traits. They could essentially have been portrayed by one and the same actor, because it was hard to differentiate the individual characters. The audience can't really connect with the characters in the movie as they are essentially faceless and one-dimensional, so you have no bond or association to the characters. And it didn't help that most of the dialogue throughout the movie was delivered with a lack of convicting and impact. It became a bit too much when you saw a guy sitting in the bush and actually defecating. Sure, I know that this is how it is done in certain parts of rural Thailand, but come on, this was a scene that was not necessary to show on the screen, and it served absolutely no purpose for the story.I will say that the actors and actresses in the movie were doing good enough jobs with their roles and characters, despite being so hindered by a lack of thorough script and storyline.The pacing of the movie was unfathomably slow, as I stated earlier, and prolonged shots of people sleeping, rural landscapes with nothing happening, random people exercising in the park, and other such pointless things didn't really help to improve the movie in any way. "Cemetery of Splendor" is slow and uneventful to say the least. However, despite this dull and mind-numbing slow pace, then there is something aesthetic and profound about the movie and its editing.I think what writer and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul was trying to accomplish with this movie was lost on me, or somehow lost in transition.

I got fooled again by the high ratings on IMDb. It was my mistake though, didn't see there were only thirteen reviews before mine. So it's obvious that the positive reviewers are or paid to do so or are related to someone playing in the movie or crew. I already saw a lot of really bad movies but this one must be in the top three of worse movies I ever saw. It's because I took a very long nap in the afternoon that I didn't fall asleep watching this garbage. Cinicly the movie is about sleep, while you will literally fight to not fall asleep watching this. I don't even want to say anything about the story line because there is just none. The only thing I can say about that is it's extremely boring. I didn't think it was even possible to make something so boring and doing it for more then two hours. Now if you are like the thirteen other morons that wrote a positive review you will probably like the complete absurd scenes like a shot of a book that goes on for several minutes, a scene where people change seats on benches in a park for several minutes, shots of a wall for several minutes, shots of a tree for several minutes and so on. I see this movie is categorized as fantasy also. Don't get fooled by that either, there is no fantasy at all. You can't even rate the actors because I don't think they are actually real actors. They're probably some random people they took out of the jungle there and gave a couple of dollars to just sit around and look depressed. In conclusion, if you are like me and always finish a movie you started to watch, even though it's absolute garbage, do not start watching this one. It will be two hours of your life you will never get back. You could pay me 10000 euros to watch it again and I won't do it. If you're not like me just start watching it and I will guarantee you that you will give up before half of the movie. Do something useful instead. Paint a wall or so and watch it dry. That will be more pleasant to watch then this.

For the few readers of my reviews, I apologize for the recent blockbuster posts. "Arrival" and "Kubo" not very far off the map, but perhaps you can take this journey.It's an exotic film, but not in the common sense. I suspect one could go to Thailand and not really find what this film presents, it may not exist.Like mind-reading, meditation, religious shrines, beauty creams, ring worm, and reincarnation....we don't really see them in action, but can sense they are present. Might as well add love and history to that list.Things we cannot see but know are there including the current in water and the air moved by fans, images used to separate scenes in this film.In the middle of this "Cemetery of Spendor" there is a scene, not linearly part of the plot, that puts us in a theater for a coming attractions unreal reel of a Thai ghost film. So this film too is a ghost film, even if the principal ghost, Itt, is not dead but hovering between lives past and present. Sleepwalking and seance-summoned (well not really a seance, there is a medium.The films pace is languid, a dog is allowed to wander into frame, a hen guides its chicks past a door in a school converted to a hospital. The lead character, she has been through both, now and then.One of my all-time favorite films, "Travelers and Magicians" has a similar feel....although that was a story, and this is almost more of a poem.Certainly not for everyone, but you will love it. And you'll want one of those psychedelic apnea respirators with color tubes. Also we find out that Europeans are living the American Dream....but dreams for this director can clearly be tricky.In my limited exposure, Weerasethakul has a wonderful way of seeing/thinking and filming, here's his weather and sports short that we got to see at SFMoMa last year.Warning : it is definitely a film as art feature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fYrRwASGQA one of my sons sure appreciated it over the Calder sculptures. To each, his own....but glad to have visited this Sleepwalking Land. (Wow he should get the cinematic rights to that book by Mia Couto!)

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.