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Chicago International Film Fest
Syndromes and a Century (Sang Sattawat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
Commissioned by New Crown Hope to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart, Syndromes and a Century is a fragmentary, experimental film which mimics the misplaced asymmetry of memory. Divided into two perspectives, the first half of the film follows Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul) in a rural Thai clinic, where serene, ever-expanding landscapes and lots of somber staring out of windows dominate. The second half of the film follows Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram) forty years later and in a contemporary, industrial Bangkok hospital. Loosely based on Weerasethakul’s memories of growing up in hospital settings (both of his parents were doctors), the disparate, anti-narrative reads like a Gregorian chant—solemn, with many of the same scenes repeating themselves, though with slight variations of camera placement and setting. At certain times, the camera meanders away from the dialogue altogether and rests upon an open field or sparse gathering of trees, as if bored by the characters’ interactions.
Using medium-long shots, with the camera often motionless for extended periods of time, Weerasethakul manages remarkable tonal shifts and uncanny, meditative displacement with seeming effortlessness. In the opening scene for instance, Toey interviews Nohng in an airy, comfortable clinic, the camera static upon Nohng’s face as she asks him about his qualifications as a physician in addition to perplexing character analyses, such as whether he likes triangles, circles or squares. The same scene repeats itself in the second half, only in a brightly lit, isolating hospital room. The familiarity of the first scene is replaced by a detached, clinical aura and focuses primarily on Toey’s face. While there are no narrative leaps in the repeated scenes, the rural/urban dichotomy drastically alters their intonations with eerie, often times hypnotic restraint.
The split story echoes themes of reincarnation, which is referenced in the marginal subplot of Dr. Ple (Arkanae Cherkam), a dentist who is also a Thai country-western singer, and Sakda (Sakda Kaewbuadee) a monk who once aspired to be a DJ. Their reluctant friendship and mutual passion for music creates a kind of homoerotic tension between them. Ple blames himself for the death of his brother and thinks that Sakda is his reincarnation. Sakda dismisses his belief, saying “I wasn’t human in my last life.” The touching though hesitant bond between them in the first half isn’t present at all in the second half, except in one tense dental chair scene where Ple repeatedly tries to cover Sakda’s eyes with a cloth, while Sakda silently and tentatively removes the cloth each time.
Both halves of the film have their assortment of colorful side characters that neither advance nor depart from the film’s quiet perseverance. Notable sketches include an older woman doctor who hides liquor in a prosthetic leg to calm her nerves before a weekly TV appearance, a boy named Off with carbon monoxide poisoning who methodically bounces a tennis ball against a wall, a painfully shy Toa who is desperately in love with Toey and also terrified of her, a classical guitar player who serenades viewers for a good five minutes, and an unidentified woman who stares directly into the camera while another doctor performs a chakra healing on Off. Her confrontational gaze disrupts the soothing soliloquy of the chakra healing, lending an air of discomfort and interrogation to an otherwise neutral occurrence. As if to accommodate for the lack of movement throughout the film, the concluding scene consists of an outdoor aerobics class, where both old and young move their bodies to the syncopated rhythms of techno music with ease and abandon. At times sleepy and methodical, Syndromes and a Century speaks to the cult of memory, and the alienating ennui that saturates our modern-day conventions.
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