Cemetery of Splendor
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Opens in L.A. on Friday, March 11, at Laemmle Royal Theatre; other area theaters TBA

Film impacts deeply when it skirts easy reference for its shape, style and substance. When a viewer has the chance to absorb a film that speaks primarily as film and not just as a story with pictures and sound plopped on it –– when the synthesis reaches that high of ineffability –– then things start to get interesting.

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor is a film whose surface is minimal; nothing much happens. Soldiers with a strange deep sleeping syndrome are transferred to a clinic in a former school; the school was built atop an ancient burial site. The sleepers are cared for by Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner), a volunteer nurse who’d attended the school as a child, and by Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a young psychic who uses her gift to help the soldiers communicate with their visiting families. Amid the spare silence of the room throb colored light tubes, installed to ease the sleepers’ distressing dreams. There’s perhaps a connection between the myth-laden world beneath the clinic and the puzzling words and diagrams Jen sees in her patient Itt’s (Banlop Lomnoi) notebook. It is a room that is not just a healing space; for Jen it’s a triggering place of memory, longing. For her, there is possibly a little too much happening beneath the surface.

Cineaste pointyheads can pick apart Weerasethakul’s film for sport. Its poetry celebrates puckish mundanity like Godard, holds Zen-still or slow-pans like Tarkovsky. Cemetery blurs the psychological and supernatural to effect a dream-colored physical reality, with a glow that emanates from the director's painterly balance between faces and staged gestures and time, and between sonority and more time. These elements crack the surface reality of the film, so each character, each bit of blessedly music-free scenery, each evanescent sound (chimes, birds, ceiling fans) does the talking.

Even action/adventure or romantic comedy films do seep in somehow, whether by story, acting, production design and usually all of that melding. The synesthesia of Cemetery of Splendor is especially profound for its realization that a film’s sound design is more important than a scored or selected soundtrack, which is almost impossible to apply without literalizing the visual imagery or dialogue. In the aching stillness of Cemetery of Splendor, near silence reigns, adding innumerable layers to everything one sees onscreen.

With its measured pacing flecked with thrillingly assymetrical scene flashes, the film bears a great director’s very personal feeling for editing rhythms; Weerasethakul's placid beats suggest that his characters and his audience must slow down a bit if only in order to think and feel. Patience pays off when we see that Weerasethakul’s characters are full of surprises, to themselves and to us, and that these aspects of themselves are not contradictory to their characters, they are their characters.

The tenderly radical Cemetery of Splendor is modern stuff, as much for its matter-of-fact sentimentality about loneliness, loss of youth and life as for its miraculous spareness of saccarhine in dealing with all that. Most incredibly and in so many novel ways, it is a film that imagines a figuratively and literally transformative power of empathy. Its final scene is just impossibly moving, though chilling might be a better word: See Jen’s face. We recognize her.
–– John Payne