Rent Cemetery of Splendour (2015)

Spoilers follow ... - Cemetery of Splendour review by NP

I love it when a film comes along that changes the perceptions of how a story should be told. Apart from being entertaining in its own right, it shakes up (to a limited extent) the tired, tried and tested mainstream diet of CGI, diluted scares and catwalk model actors with identi-kit personalities. ‘Cemetery of Splendor’ couldn’t be further than that style of blandness. And yet in rejecting everything stale about traditional storytelling, it sadly creates a blandness all its own.

A school in Northern Thailand has been turned into a makeshift hospital to house soldiers who have been afflicted by an unexplained sleeping sickness, which renders them comatose for vast periods of time, punctuated by periods of awakening.

Volunteer Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas) strikes up a friendship with patient Itt (Banlob Lomnoi) during his few hours of wakefulness. There is speculation that the school was built over a cemetery and the dead are feeding off the minds of the sleeping soldiers. Jenjira also becomes friendly with Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), who claims to have some rapport with the sleepers.

That is about all as far as a story is concerned, and it is stretched far, far beyond interest to fill the 2 hour running time. The frustration I felt watching is that anything else dramatic was not likely to occur grew the further in I ventured. There’s no need for scenes of so little happening to last so long, one after the other. All these elongated moments are deliberate artistic decisions, and so cannot be brushed away by budgetary or lack-of-time reasons. And the film has attracted a mass of critical acclaim – so clearly, I just didn’t ‘get’ it.

The camera is primarily static. People wander in and out of shot just as they would in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Sometimes you only see the back of a character’s head throughout the scene. In true documentary style, the acting is very naturalistic and the characters very believable. While I would commend director/writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul for refusing to utilise anything traditional about this project, and am glad his work has attracted the commendations of critics, this is so uncommercial, it is sadly deeply un-enthralling.

Enthralling vision - Cemetery of Splendour review by PR

I loved Weerasethakul's 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives', it created such a haunting world that I had never forgotten it. I read about 'Cemetery of Splendour' in the Guardian when it was shown at Cannes in 2015, and kept the cutting, but there was no way the film was going to reach Swansea where I live. Imagine my gratitude to discover that 'Cemetery of Splendour' is available through Cinema Paradiso. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. I loved the peaceful pace, with its natural sound, which so effectively created atmosphere, and particularly enjoyed the natural world close by the hospital. Weerasethakul is clearly fascinated by the fluid interface between the material and spiritual worlds; he portrays the spiritual world as matter-of-fact, as it is to those sensitive to it. I enjoyed the study of the central character, Jenjira, beautifully played by Jenjira Pongpas Widner, an ordinary middle-aged woman volunteering her time to caring for a sick soldier. The film was a welcome insight into the Thai soul.

zzzzzzzzzz - Cemetery of Splendour review by CSF

The soldiers of the film are not the only one to have a long sleep, I had as well. I don't know what more I could say to make the 100 words. The story is like a never ending documentary on the fact that these soldiers have to sleep all the time and nobody knows why so they start to invent fairy tales to explain it: a classic.