Apichatpong Weerasethakulm’s Cemetery of Splendour

Apichatpong Weerasethakulm’s film, Cemetery of Splendour, is, for those who see it, interesting on many different levels. To begin with, viewers cannot be sure what to make of the film. The entire story is about soldiers who have a mysterious illness that makes them fall into comatose states where they appear to be dreaming. They exist in a former school set in a rural area of Thailand. One of the characters, Jen, who lives in the rural area and volunteers to help care for the soldiers, attended the school when she was young, long before it became a hospital. She becomes attached to one of the soldiers named Itt, who has moments where he comes out of his comatose state and talks to Jen about what occurs in his coma. Jen, who lives a presumably mundane life as a housewife is fascinated with It and the memories he reveals to her from the dreams he has in his comatose state. Another woman in the area, Keng, is a psychic who comes to the hospital to help the families of the soldiers to communicate with them. While this is part of the interest the film generates, it is not the most bizarre aspect of the film. What makes Keng’s role in the film unusual is that everybody accepts her and her powers as if they are a normal part of life, and perhaps they are in rural Thailand. Different methods to help the soldiers regain their normal lives are attempted such as colored light therapy—again, for a cynical Western audience—weird. The colored tubes bring to mind all sorts of strange connections that have nothing to do with soldiers or hospitals such as refrigerators, television tubes, tanning salons, and nightclubs. Viewers wonder how these lights can improve the soldiers’ states of consciousness and the lights just increase the weird reality that is the film’s setting. Viewers feel as if they too are dreaming and that weirdness lingers long after the film ends when viewers recall what it is like to be caught up in Weerasethakulm’s vision.

Part of the weird feelings that viewers get when viewing Cemetery of Splendour are related to the dreams that the soldiers have, and that are recounted for viewers in various ways. Glenn Kenny of the New York Times says, “The viewer feels to be floating with the imagery, and when the cutting briefly quickens, a lulling, bobbing motion is simulated. The mood Mr. Weerasethakul conjures is all the more extraordinary when you consider that the movie’s premise, in the hands of almost any other director, would be used to build some kind of horror movie” (Kenny). Yet, it is not a horror movie, although it does include some mystery.

When Jen finds a notebook in which Itt has written some strange entries including some sketches of a building, she wonders if this is not documentation of his dreams during his comatose times. The sketches seem to be of the hospital itself. Jen remembers that when she went to school there, stories of the school having been built on an ancient site that has mythical connections were told. The spirits who still exist in the ancient space, or perhaps the gods that are said to inhabit it, may be responsible for the soldiers’ mysterious illness. At the very least, they may affect the dreams the soldiers have. In the end, Jen, who at the beginning of the film was bored and uninspired, which is why she came to volunteer at the hospital, discovers herself—a self of which she was previously unaware.

Even self-discovery does not seem like a possible outcome of Cemetery of Splendour because throughout the film nothing really happens. Some might even say the film was boring. That does not mean it is not emotional. The whole idea that all these soldiers can no longer communicate with their families is sad. Yet, the film still does not give viewers much to hold on to. They watch the beautiful scenes that do not really flow from one to the next and sometimes include strange occurrences that seem not to make any sense. It is when the film is over that viewers realize the movie is very much like a dream. Western viewers are accustomed to dreams in films, but they are usually given a cue that the character is dreaming. This does not happen in Cemetery of Splendour. What may be the dreams of the characters are experienced as a strange sequence, and then the viewer must decide later that what they experienced must have been a dream sequence. Then they realize that perhaps it is they who were dreaming while awake rather than the soldiers dreaming while they are asleep. After all, it is the viewer who has witnessed the story of the soldiers in a weird, dream-like event rather than the other way around—or at least that is all the viewers can be sure of. Stephen Sharot of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies talks about filmmakers, he calls surrealists, who made movies that included dream sequences that did not