Nonureva Really Surprised!

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

chaos-rampant Vague talk of art nine times out of ten will miss the whole point. Critics will enumerate a few themes, but that is repeating words, knowing one word instead of ten things. The main thing is that here we have a filmmaker who knows what it all is out there, or better said: knows how to sculpt currents of life with a clarity that is neither misty-eyed nor cynical, that is both unwavering gaze of the present and mental awareness of broader cycles. Let's see what is all that. The film is split in two halves, both centered around a hospital with recurring characters coming and going. The first half is an idyllic countryside reverie with lush tropical foliage looming outside the hospital windows; it is a love song wafting through the quiet summer night, the sound of crickets carried by the breeze, stories of climbing mango trees and reincarnation, sunlight over green pastures. Inside this part there is another story of denied love but look how gentle the emotional handling; it ends with laughter, with no one needlessly wounded or wallowing in misery, with no judgement and no one's soul exposed except a tiny corner tenderly to us. So the first part is unspooling some lovely mood, simple so you may not think much of the film at this point. Except we have a second part, again in a hospital, repeats the opening shot of the film but now the pov has been reversed—with us 'looking back' at what was being looked at in the first scene. There are several shifts in this second part. Some obvious ones, in time and mood, the hospital now is modern, the mood is sterile, the jungle out the window is now the concrete boom of the big city. A little less obviously: we now miss the rustic gift of wrapped crispy pork, the small talk of musical dreams with the dentist, no one tells stories about mango trees or reincarnation anymore. There is no love song. Traffic instead of crickets.To emphasize this bizarre new landscape of life, there is a sequence starting with when we see a legless man crouching on the floor, a bizarre sight intentionally shot this way to jar. People are being fitted with artificial limbs in the basement, and the imagery though now it makes sense is still depressing by contrast to earlier. Now there's carbon monoxide poisoning.However, other things have not changed. The stone statue of the sitting Buddha is in the same place. The old Buddhist monk still has funny dreams with chicken, still swaps medical advice for herbs that supposedly sooth confused mind. You may appreciate that his memory is better now. The best part is at the level of perception of things. Until the second segment with the drastic shift ahead, we don't know all that tropical bliss and boredom is going to be in the past. Suddenly we have memories of a past life, colored as more pure because we recall it as more pure. It is a bit of a mystery just how this has happened, in physical terms, how the two worlds fit together, which is for the better; this is not to be reasoned with, the insight is of emotional intellect.By this I mean a specific thing, a shift in watching. Now the first part seems more pure, the modern second part more depressing which makes the contrast a little mawkish and the film slightly contrived. But that is in large part in the eye.If you look closer, in the present segment people are no more sullen or hurried, as we'd think normal to show in modern life, than at first. The surrounding world has changed of course, and that does affect the experience of living. Whereas there used to be clean riverwater to bathe one's broken parts in, now the old woman has to conjure the cleansing illusion of healing water. Isn't cinema nothing but a cleansing illusion? It can only have as much effect, as much depth as you let it. This scene is key. Faced with the old crone, the boy does what? Walks away suspicious of the healing effect. Next to traffic and carbon monoxide poisoning, now there is cynicism. So if you, similarly, turn your back on the healing promise of the film and walk away with just an artful assertion of the effects of modernization, you miss the whole reason behind this.It all ends with two unforgettable shots of this cinematic healing illusion in actual effect; everything sucked into the roaring void but that is not the end, the parting shot of public gymnastics in a park shows a renewal and zest for it all to start again, an absolutely marvelous moment.So we've had some expansion of our awareness in the first part because of the freeflow and not knowing where it goes, colored by memory in the second part and contraction as the mind points out logical contrasts between past and present, setting limits to vision because suddenly we define the present by what it's not, the 'purer' past.Now emptying ourselves of all that in the first of the two shots (samadhi), this last shot rings loud and clear, restoring the world to broader dimensions. It is one of the most transcendent moments in film, equal to the dance scene of another Asian film, Sharasojyu.In both cases it is not the shot itself, it is the placement, opening our eyes to it after all we've seen. There are no words, no conventional wisdom for the mind to latch onto except breathing in the air of that one exuberant moment of people.This is what the Buddhist know and cultivate in meditation as prajna or intuitive wisdom, understanding the one root beneath the myriad branches of illusion.Something to meditate upon.

Absyrd Syndromes and a Century begins as a fascinating, engaging experience. It maintains that for about half an hour, but then something happens, and it descends into a dull unpleasantry. It never loses its brooding atmosphere, but it just becomes... indulgent, pedantic, bloated, and most of all, boring. The director becomes the audience, he takes long shots of trees and buildings so as to recreate the setting of his childhood, maybe for nostalgic purposes. But I, personally, wasn't raised in a hospital environment, so I, personally, didn't personally make a PERSONAL connection. I understood beforehand that there was a lack of narrative in the story, but I honestly didn't expect it to descend into such uninvolving emptiness.

liehtzu Pusan Film Festival Reviews 8: Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Perhaps Apichatpong Weerasethakul's too new to the big leagues to come off as stale, as Tsai Ming-liang does - his films continue to surprise and puzzle. It's hard for me to put my finger on why I didn't like "Syndromes and a Century" as much as I was sure I would, given how enamored I am with "Blissfully Yours" and "Tropical Malady" (the latter is one of the best films of the new century). It probably didn't help that I was running on just a little sleep, the film moved incredibly slowly, and the Korean girl beside me was snoring away by the halfway point. I was expecting more of Weerasethakul's strange, lulling magic, but "Syndromes and a Century" seemed banal compared to the last two films. Still, if there's a film of the festival I'd like to see again immediately - barring Hong Sang-soo's latest - it's this one. From the opening moments you know you're in Weerasethakul territory - a close-up of modest little fellow applying for a rural hospital job as he fields increasingly absurd questions from the female interviewer whose story will be the focus of the film's first half... and after a time a slow camera movement over the balcony to the lush fields and rain forest beyond, and rolling of the credits. The movie's divided into two parts, the first supposedly set in the 1970s and about the director's mother - though you'd glean neither the mother reference or the period setting from watching the film as neither is mentioned, and the setting looks like a rural Thai hospital of the sort you'd find today. A security guard is smitten with the doctor, and she goes on to tell him of a man she may already be in love with, a farmer of rare orchids, and how she met him, in an extended flashback sequence that the director sometimes intentionally confounds with the time period of the telling of the story. The camera drifts around the hospital, where a dentist sings for a monk who at one time wanted to be a disc jockey, and down corridors and along the outside of the hospital, where an ominous low buzzing noise plays over the soundtrack as the camera languidly drifts past outside statues. In the second half the setting changes. We're now in a massive, sterile, big-city hospital, and the the rest of the film is about the man. At the start of the split the same interview from the beginning repeats itself, though the office and clothing worn by the two is different and there are slight but notable changes in the dialogue. Now the camera is pointed at the doctor conducting the interview, and this is the last time she will feature prominently in the film. After the interview the camera follows him as he goes about his duties and tries to find spare time for his beautiful girlfriend. Conversations recur, but again there are differences in the setting and dialogue. The man sneaks into a room in the basement with his girlfriend (a room used to store prosthetic limbs), followed by a very, very long shot of some kind of ventilation tube sucking smoke out of another room, and finally an outdoor dance aerobics sequence with peppy music. What this all means is anyone's guess. Few filmmakers achieve Weerasethakul's mastery of the medium and its possibilities after so few films. He knows how to convey a sense of unease and menace through banal actions or images, and he has a singular way of continuing to fold over what little narrative exists in his films until he has an unusual type of origami, the meaning or possible meanings of which the viewer is left to mull over while scratching his or her head upon exiting the theater. "Syndromes and a Century" seemed a little too plain while I watched it, yet I can't help chuckling now and then or stopping midway through a sentence to contemplate it while writing about it. Ingmar Bergman once made a remarkable comment about Andrei Tarkovsky, that Tarkovsky had opened a door to "a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease." Apichatpong Weerasethakul isn't a Tarkovsky, but he is opening doors; "Syndromes" sticks to the mind in weird ways.

Chris Knipp More for the strictly art-house audience than his previous Tropical Malady, the young Thai auteur's latest is an impressionistic and disorienting series of scenes centering around several different hospitals, and focused on couples, romance, job interviews, and patients. There's a singing dentist who serenades a young Buddhist monk in saffron robe whose teeth he's working on. Later the dentist-songwriter is seen performing for an audience on a fairground stage. A sequence where a potential employee or medical school candidate and an older Buddhist monk are both interviewed by a young woman doctor is repeated in the film's second half, with different camera angles and variations in the dialogue and the tone of the scenes. The film is split down the middle, though not as distinctly as in Weerasethakul's two earlier films. The gentle dental work scene where doctor and patient share their dreams and passions is repeated, only this time the leafy trees and sunshine outside are replaced by a chilling white environment, a woman assistant is present, and no one speaks. Outdoor shots focus on wide country and city spaces, and on leafy trees seen from below with sky beyond. A young man who may have brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning swats a tennis ball down a hospital corridor. The young man who wants to become a doctor now is one, in white coat, and stares sadly into space in a long static shot. An older woman doctor hides a bottle of whisky in a prosthetic leg and drinks to relax before her weekly appearance on public television. People talk inconclusively of reincarnation. There's a visit to an orchid grower, who buys an orchid from a hospital grounds, and is visited by a woman doctor in his study after he's hung the orchid outside. All this would be annoying and disquieting were the scenes not so gentle, subtle, and evocative. Weerasethakul is an original, no doubt about that. His weddings of image and sound are sometimes numbing, sometimes subtle and enchanting, and always cryptic.Very good -- as my Beowulf teacher, who happened to be Jean Renoir's son, used to say after a passage of Old English was read -- and what does it mean? There's no simple answer to that. These are reminiscences, we're told (though not in the film itself), of the director's parents, both of them doctors; of their courtship; and of what it was like for him to grow up in the environs of a hospital. Weerasetahakul says that the first half, with its warmer, gentler mood, is for his mother, and the second, where scenes are repeated in brisker and cooler variations and the hospital is an antiseptic urban one, is for his father. Weerasethakul is a bold stylist and a confident setter of moods. But there's not a lot to put together into a narrative, just a scattered set of observations. It's a little bit as if you were watching Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi with tiny dialogue scenes.The film lingers on long shots of exteriors, and glides back and forth in front of a large white Buddha. It returns to a room where prostheses are made and fitted to patients and finds the room filled with smoke (could it be the carbon dioxide the young man suffers from?) which is slowly sucked out by a large funneled pipe, while ominous mechanical music throbs in the background. Don't worry about spoilers here. The ending, a large outdoor aerobics class, concludes and reveals nothing. Syndromes and a Century never unlocks its mysteries, it just casts its spell and departs with a blacked-out screen.