Cemetery of Splendour | 2015 Cannes Film Festival Review

Syndromes And A Cemetery: Thai Joe Returns With A Familiar Stunner

An elementary school-cum-hospital built atop a “cemetery of kings,” ancient spaces reactivated the present, and a female medium able to channel and speak to ghosts and past lives: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour is the only 2015 remake of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) that matters. That said, this is unmistakably an Apichatpong a.k.a. Joe production, and couldn’t be further from a terrifying experience. Joe has long smudged the chalk line between cinema and art installation traditions, and Cemetery represents his most ambivalent yet in that regard, drifting from narrative concerns into lurid light show and back nearly imperceptibly. There may be more structurally dynamic films in his oeuvre, but there are hardly any as serene and subtly moving as this one, which also represents his first digitally-shot feature-length picture.

As always, Joe brings back his regular actors/characters from previous films and let’s them exist in both isolation to and in conversation with the ‘past lives’ of those films. Here, Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) is a hospital volunteer with a lame leg who tends to Itt (Banlip Lomnoi, the soldier Tropical Malady (2004) who hunts for his lover deep in Thai forest), one of many soldiers suffering from a kind of narcolepsy that makes them spontaneously lose consciousness. Jenjira meets another volunteer, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), the aforementioned medium, and the two will go on a blind and delirious hunt with Itt and his past incarnations’ lingering ghosts, which thematically serves as an excursion into Thailand’s disappearing origins in the face of the current dictatorship’s modernization projects.

It’s a pared down take on familiar themes, but it achieves a new level of sustained, serene hypnosis in Joe’s cinema. Scenes progress–or rather, float–one to the next, undetermined by logic, into and out of realities, hyperrealities, and surrealities. Hospital equipment is indistinguishable from Dan Flavin sculptures, silences become statements, and mundanity rendered tragic. A dream–that is, reality–is a nightmare by default, and living becomes an act of staring, studying, eyes wide open, the horrors of what has come, willing the mind to wake up and return to a former utopia. The feeling isn’t quite discernible until the film is over, but there’s a sense of heartbreak here that rivals the most devastating of Joe’s features–Tropical Malady, included.

Reviewed on May 18th at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard – 123 mins.

★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆