Syndromes and a Century (Sang Sattawat) Apichatpong Weerasethakul Thailand/France/Austria 2006
What if a possibly great film is a complete bastard to watch? A bugbear that always irritates me when watching a 'difficult' film is whether said film is worth watching or not. In effect, is the trouble and effort of getting to grips with the piece worth the potential outcome. Will I think about the film afterwards and mull it over or was it just a mental slog for nothing. This dilemma is exactly what one confronts when you watch Syndromes and a Century. It's a film that is more entertaining to dissect afterwards than it is to actually watch. Great as a thought exercise or a talking point, minimal joy is derived whilst stuck watching the damn thing.
The next film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul who gained rave reviews from the arthouse crowd for Tropical Malady last year, Syndromes and a Century is a strong contender for inaccessibility owing to its bivalvular structure and almost total disregard for narrative. It tells roughly the same set of anecdotes, with the same characters in two different locations. One a rural hospital possibly set in the 1970s, the second a modern urban one. Just like a piece of music we get two variations on a theme which play themselves out. A tempting analogy mentioned by several other reviews (notably Screen International) owing to the film’s production genesis in a development project celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Apichatpong Weerasethakul has gone on record as attributing the first rural half to his mother and the second urban half to his father, so in this sense the two halves are merely different takes on the same events describing the setting for how the director's parents (who were physicians hence the hospitals) met.
His previous film Tropical Malady aside, the more mainstream example of a film that does anything remotely similar would be Mulholland Drive and some of the other films by David Lynch. Mulholland Drive notably is comprised of two halves that together make no linear narrative sense yet still seem complete. The effect is similar here but more removed from Tropical Malady by the repetition and the compelling climax of a basement room pipe, sucking smoke out of a room. Just like the 'No hay banda' scene in Club Silencio in Muholland Drive it’s an utterly terrifying and mesmerising moment, all the more so for the incongruous nature of the scene. After a whole film of languidly viewed scenes the characters are finally left out and we're given something to traumatise us. Then follows the absurdly chirpy ending.
Grudgingly I concede that Syndromes and a Century might be the nearest thing to a masterpiece I've seen all year. Alas the only solution is to watch the damn thing again.
