CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Admittedly, there is an event unfolding at the heart of Cemetery of Splendour, there is an overflow of colours and with these, the lethargy setting in the whole city and maybe the whole country as well. This, though, is no sign of a division, but rather, it testifies to some literal deepening. The mise-en-scène digs deep into space in every direction. After an unsettling superimposition that fuses two perspectives, a vertical one on several flights of escalators, a horizontal one on some hospital room whose luminous machines are softly glowing, we see Jenjira come back to the same empty room, covered with a mantle of dead leaves and damaged objects, as though several years had elapsed all at once. From this very spot, Itt, Keng and Jenjira’s odd story is to unfold, in spaces that are fully open: not only the kiosks and platforms which are part and parcel of all Weerasethakul’s films, setting characters upon temporary stages, but also the park which is presented like a palace, or a football ground which is oddly unsettled by excavators, like an open-air version of the dune chamber in Stalker. Cemetery of Splendour is like those ribbons which you very slightly move at one end, leading to a gigantic sway at the other end. From the very first shots showing Itt asleep on his bed, under a window framing the outside space, to a football ground which, at the end, leaves Jenjira baffled, the film narrates a kind of low-key explosion of space, a slow confusion of above and below, of proximity and distance.
Cyril Béghin, Cahiers du cinéma, September 2015