Cemetery of Splendour – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Starring Jenjira Pongpas Widner, Banlop Lomnoi, Jarinoattra Rueangram

There are few experiences as singular as watching somebody else sleep.  On the one hand, the watcher has a power the sleeper does not possess; on the other, the sleeper represents the point to which a human subject can withhold his or her mysteries, irrespective of the close proximity of an observer.  Watching a film can be like watching a sleeper, as viewers are drawn into an intimate, watchful relationship with a subject that cannot observe them, contained as it is within the boundaries of its own self-sufficient world – in other words, its dreams.  Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul delves deeply into this experience in Cemetery of Splendour, the follow-up to his deeply moving, exquisitely imaginative Palme D’or-winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

The film’s diaphanous wisp of story involves a group of soldiers who are struck by a sleeping sickness, and an ordinary woman, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) who forges a connection with one of the sleepers, Itt (Banlop Lomnoi).  Although Itt experiences brief spells of wakefulness, it is a local psychic, Keng (Jarinoattra Rueangram) who ultimately provides the connection by which Jen and Itt’s experiences merge.  Also involved are the otherworldly presences of two Laotian princess-goddesses, and a mysterious light installation that appears in the soldiers’ hospital wards as a kind of experimental therapy.

It goes without saying that Cemetery of Splendour is essential viewing, but the film is by no means as welcoming an experience as Uncle Boonmee.  Cooler to the touch than its predecessor, and absent the erotic charge of 2004’s ravishing Tropical Malady, Cemetery of Splendour at first appears to have most in common with Apichatpong’s 2006 film Syndromes and a Century.  Like that film – which similarly took place in a hospital – Cemetery of Splendour uses a medical environment as a meditative space in which mysticism and mundanity unfold at the same incremental pace.  Also, like Syndromes and a Century, Cemetery of Splendour is a kind of fugue, in which a relatively realist opening movement gives way to a second phase that plunges headlong into the dream-state.  Tropical Malady performed a similar feat, but there the fantasy was rooted in the experience of the lovers at the centre of the narrative.  The specific trigger for Cemetery of Splendour’s dive into the otherworldly is harder to determine – and thus the effect is more disorienting again, since it never gestures to a specific allegorical “explanation”.

The film’s central idea appears to be that of illness itself – and of the disassociation of the consciousness (or perhaps spirit) from the body that is part of the experience of illness.  In a way, Cemetery of Splendour is Apichatpong’s most melancholic film, as the maladies and syndromes of his earlier works give way to a condition that, as the title this time implies, is inevitably terminal.  The film also engages directly with war – a persistent presence in Apichatpong’s cinema, albeit one that is often overlooked, as it seems so contrary to the placid pacing of his work.  Here, the surface reality of Jen and Itt coexists with a kind of other plane in which deities conduct never-ending wars.  War, then, underpins the spirit world of the film, even as it haunts the periphery of its physical plane, in the form of murals and statues that Apichatpong’s camera observes without editorialising hysteria.

Those already familiar with Apichatpong’s work – which is characterised not only by its uncanny beauty but also by its purposely challenging embrace of stillness and slowness – will already be part-way prepared for the particular demands and rewards of Cemetery of Splendour.  Those new to his singular filmmaking may not find this the most hospitable place to begin.  There is no question, though, that this is a beautiful, contemplative piece of cinema, and one that treads its own singular path between the waking and the dreamt.