Syndromes and a Century

Back to the NFT for Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku’s latest film, Syndromes and a Century. Like Tropical Malady, this is a film in two parts, but the parts to this film are more closely aligned, in a strange way making it much harder to relate the parts than the more distinct halves of Tropical Malady.

Both parts of Syndromes are set in hospitals, with largely the same cast playing the same characters (or at least characters with the same names).

The first half focusses on Dr Toey, her hopeless suitor and her unreciprocated love for an orchid collector who in turn loves another from afar. We first see her interviewing a Dr Nohng for a job. There is a subplot featuring a singing dentist infatuated with a monk who wants to be a DJ. The tone is lighthearted and gentle.

The second half begins in a different hospital, possibly a different time, certainly a different place, maybe a different world. It begins with the same job interview, but thereafter we focus on Dr Nohng and discover his relationship with girlfriend Joy is doomed. The tone is much darker, with Lynchian flourishes and menacing moments of camerawork and offscreen sound.

The NFT notes kindly summarises some of the dualities between the halves: female/male, country/city, natural light/electric light, but this hardly begins to make order of the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship between the halves. They are not versions of the same story, and to talk of parallel or alternative realities doesn’t seem to fit either. It is much more complex and elusive than that. There is talk in the first half of past lives, and in the second of future lives, yet the second half seemed to me to suggest not another life but another plane of existence, maybe a spirit world, or something akin to limbo or hell, especially the scenes in the basement of amputees, and grotesque women staring out the camera, and a fantastic swirling thick smoke slowly moving towards an extraction pipe so wonderfully filmed that I thought that I cold smell the acrid smoke.

Which made me wonder whether Buddhists believe in hell, or maybe the film was setting up another duality – eastern vs western. But a quick google seems to show there are Buddhist ideas of heaven and hell, and even (a quote that seems to fit Joe’s worlds very nicely) “the Buddha's Teaching shows us that there are heavens and hells not only beyond this world, but in this very world itself”.

The film ends back in full colour and outdoors with a group aerobic session – I got from this a sense of souls reborn and the joy of living.

Another reading of the film is that in the first half the relationships are ones of delicious(ly) unrequited love; the bridge between the sections has the monk asking the singing dentist to follow him, suggesting a relationship is about to begin, but the monk disappears and we see the dentist alone in his surgery; in the second section the key relationship between Nohng and his girlfriend disintegrates, and there is hint that Dr Toey and her nebbishe suitor are going out for lunch, and a shot of her looking forlornly and desperately at her desk – so perhaps there is a comparison of the exquisiteness, the hopefulness, of love not yet declared vs the hell of dying or loveless relationships. Or maybe it is just a case that Dr Toey in the first half is an optimist and Dr Nohn in the second a pessimist.

These are all ifs and maybes. The wonder of the film (along with some incredibly powerful visual moments) is that its meanings remain outside and beyond the viewer, as though being channelled directly into the viewer’s unconscious, challenging the brain to see patterns but always remaining elusive. As Browning put it “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”