thoughts on ‘Cemetery of Splendour’
Martina Bani
“At the heart of the kingdom, other than the rice fields, there is nothing.”
How do we experience nothingness in time-space? The poignant sense of place in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015) is activated by the film’s contemplative inhabitation of cinematic time. We are often left on hold, drifting, presented with the life that is, unraveling on its own, with or without our noticing. Weerasethakul, however, invites us to notice.
Looking out the window - a screen in itself - tropical tree leaves swish silently, in a secret harmony made of wandering chickens and animist paraphernalia. This particular Thai life flows in unrelenting contrast and reconciliation between ancient gods and present trauma, living psychics and dead goddesses, dormant soldiers and waking spirits.
The film follows an aging Thai woman, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner), and a psychic Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram). They volunteer at a makeshift clinic - a former elementary school - in Khon Kaen to tend to mysteriously comatose soldiers. The soldier in Jen’s care, Itt (Banlop Lomnoi) keeps regaining and losing consciousness to the rhythm of Jen’s touch. In communicating with the soldiers through their sleep, Keng acquaints us with the blurred boundaries between past and present lives, and the spirits of one resurfacing on the other. From two incarnated goddesses Jen learns that the clinic lies on top of an old cemetery where ancient gods use the soldiers’ energy to fight their wars, hence the narcolepsy. As a last treatment resort, the clinic obtains futuristic light machines, formerly used on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (“do Americans have nightmares too?”) as a way to encourage therapeutic dreams.
These neon-coloured cane-like tubes serve as the film’s aesthetic medium to communicate inside and outside the narration. While they are in the service of the story’s attempts at anti-Cartesian therapy, healing the mind through the body, they also conjoin psychedelic technology with the spiritualism of Keng’s mentalist powers and Jen’s supernatural encounter with the goddesses of the shrine.
In these deeply visual interstices of time, like Jen we drift in a mythological microcosm, not fully aware of whether we are sleeping or dreaming. We know that we’re not hallucinating; the nothingness of our fantasies is nonetheless present, poignantly present. The film masters this space in between. In a pivotal scene, Keng connects her mind with the dormant Itt’s, and walks with Jen in an intimate journey imagining the former palace beneath the clinic. We are in its splendour too, we touch it, we are touched. Even too much. Nominated for A Certain Regard at Cannes, Cemetery of Splendour offers a meditation on film itself: in the blurred space of imagined realities we are brought to feel completely immersed in the time between the film’s world and ours.
