I have now seen three of Apichatpong's films (Mysterious Objects, Blissfully Yours and now this). It finally occurred to me what is going on and why so many people, already enamored of offbeat, experimental and artsy films, still find his work difficult.
I really got into "Mysterious Objects" at first, the "exquisite corpse" method and the way a simple story got embellished as he went along. But Apichatpong seemed to lose interest in the narrative, so the film became a static slide show of his travels, losing all of its narrative energy.
"Sud Saneha" (Blissfully Yours) never got me engaged. It was an agonizing experience in lost opportunity and self-indulgent amateurism.
So now, I can say that "Syndromes and a Century" is by far the best of the three. I gave it 6 out of 10.
I finally understood that Apichatpong is an artist of still images. He has no idea what to do with emotions or the people who feel them. He just allows them to populate his canvas, and pays no attention to what they do. In fact, if they do nothing and stay still, that's even better.
The camera moves from time to time, but that is clearly just giving better depth to his still images. He has no skills in using images that move, other than to take them in in a decidedly passive way. There are times in this movie when it is effective (the steam entering the pipe, for example), but most of the time, it underscores his discomfort with the moving image.
I really want to like his films, mostly because here in Thailand, popular culture is so crushing and stifling, anything artistic is like drops of water in a desert. But I can only cut so much slack.
