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SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
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FILM SELECTION
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"A quiet masterpiece, delicate and full of wonder." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Sheer enchantment. There is no more generous vision in contemporary cinema than that of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, previous subject of a “Film Now” retrospective at the Cinematheque. His latest lovely conundrum, SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, commissioned for the New Crowned Hope project, is certain to turn up on many Ten Best lists at the end of the year, given the critical acclaim it has received. A film about memory, love both requited and not, and the beauty of the world (Apichatpong shoots trees, sun, water like a latter day Renoir), SYNDROMES is an homage to the director's parents who met as doctors in a rural hospital. Full of formal play (the pre-credit sequence alone packs in more invention than many other entire films) and teasing enigmas, the film is divided into two parts. In the first, the young, ardent Toa arrives in a rural hospital to court a young woman physician, Dr. Toey. The second, set in a modern hospital complex, replays the story of courtship, but slyly transforms many of its features and details. Because the symmetries of theme, setting, and character between SYNDROME's two halves are more pronounced than in the director's sometimes bewildering TROPICAL MALADY, it's tempting to assign them dichotomous values - rural/urban, female/male, past/present, memory/fantasy - but Apichatpong's mysterious modus seems averse to such strict dualities. Among the surplus of vividly rendered characters whose tales intersect, disrupt, or abut the main love story are a dipso doctor who keeps her bottle stashed in a prosthetic leg, an authority on rare orchids, a Buddhist monk who is a DJ-manqué, and his would-be lover, a dentist who in his spare time croons Thai country tunes in a green sequined jacket. “It's absolutely mesmerizing” (David Ansen, Newsweek). - James Quandt
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