A short excerpt from the booklet essay by Carmen Gray.
Suwichakornpong’s film is one of brave risks. Far from springing from fertile local conditions institutionally, it takes its stand amid cinema that’s more of a beacon of resistance against adversity. Financed on a tight budget through friends and family and support from Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund (it also won one of that festival’s Tiger awards), it’s found exposure and admirers on the festival circuit, despite a tough time with the notoriously strict censors at home. They saddled it with a 20+ age-rating – making it the first film in Thailand to have been handed the highest restriction under its controversial new rating system.
The film focuses on the complex relationship between young male nurse Pun and Ake, the patient he’s been hired to take care of, who’s been paralysed from the waist down in an accident and is living, bed-ridden, in the old manor of his affluent father. Rather than adopting a straightforward, linear narrative structure, it expands in reverberating pulses, echoes and fugues. Quarter of an hour unfolds before the opening credits scroll, bookended by a repeated sequence: Ake, lying in bed, is asked if he’d like the lights switched off. Not responding, he’s plunged into darkness. Non-diegetic guitar distortion squalls through the silence (a track from Thai band The Photo Sticker Machine), at odds with any thought of slumber. The soundtrack’s discordant jolt reminds us that against decline stirs restless energy, the violent disruption intrinsic to all change and nature’s will to regenerate. It’s an energy that fights to assert itself throughout the film, as Ake gradually comes to reconcile the pain of his daily, repetitive reality as a wider part of socio-political history and a constantly transforming, luminous universe.
The disorienting looping of time is reminiscent of Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (2006), in which scenes from the first half - a hospital consultation in which a monk suggests a cure for a doctor’s psychic discontent, for instance - repeat with slight variations, in a different medical facility, and decade. Comparisons between Suwichakornpong and Weerasethakul were always going to be inevitable, given her compatriot’s towering influence over the Thai independent film scene, and the fact that the fragmented structure of Mundane History came about in the editing process at the hands of Lee Chatametikool, an editor both directors share. Though given the directors’ shared Thai heritage it’s only natural their films reside under a comparable Buddhist cosmology; a world in which the malaise of physical impermanence and enervation co-exists with the rejuvenating possibility of spiritual transcendence, repetitions echo reincarnation, and death circles back into life.
Carmen Gray’s complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the DVD release.
Essay
A short excerpt from the booklet
DVD Reviews
Sight & Sound by Sam Wigley
Film Comment by Meredith Slifkin
The Telegraph by Daisy Bowie-Sell
DVD Beaver by Eric Cotenas
Arts Shelf by Adam Gonet
Cine-Vue by Ben Nicholson
Digital Fix by Anthony Nield
Sunday Telegraph by Alan Stanbrook
Mondo Digital by Nathaniel Thompson
Cinematic Investigations by Harriet Warman
Film Reviews
Edinburgh Film Festival
Variety
The Hollywood Reporter
New York Times
Village Voice
Seattle International Film Festival
Bangkok Post
Connections
(i) Interview with Anocha Suwichakornpong
(ii) World Film Festival Report
(iii) The Wheel of Life
(iv) Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal
(v) Photo Sticker Machine
(vi) Electric Eel Films