It has been five long years since Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s last feature, the stunning masterpiece Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Now his much-anticipated follow-up has finally arrived, though, to everyone’s surprise, it screens in the Un Certain Regard section (an act of utter disrespect. It may even be unprecedented for a Palme follow-up to be excluded from the main competition. Can you imagine them demoting Cannes darlings like Haneke or the Dardennes?) Perhaps the powers that be were afraid he’d capture the award again? It certainly would be possible, as Cemetery of Splendour is overflowing with quiet beauty—enough possibly to melt even the icy cold hearts of jury presidents Joel and Ethan Coen.
The film takes place in Khon Kaen (the literal translation of the Thai title is “Love in Khon Khean”), a small town in Northeast Thailand where Weerasethakul grew up. A group of soldiers have been affected by a sleeping sickness, and a school has been converted into a clinic for them. The protagonist, Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner, a perennial presence in Weerasethakul’s work) volunteers at the clinic, where she encounters Keng, a young woman with psychic powers who communicates with the sleeping soldiers’ spirits. In particular, Jenjira becomes enamored with a soldier named Itt (Tropical Malady’s Banlop Lomnoi), who occasionally wakes and accompanies her for conversations nearby—or are these moments when Jenjira falls asleep at his bedside and finds him in her dreams?
The film consists mostly of beautiful dialogue scenes between Jenjira and Keng, Itt and two Laotian goddesses who join her for a snack, as well as more briefly Jenjira and her American lover Richard. They all speak casually about their lives, their memories, the town and the soldiers – pleasant conversations circling around discreet themes of sadness and loss. At the core of Cemetery is a sense of lament, even fear. Leave it to Apichatpong to express these complexly dark feelings through a film of poetic, muted pleasure.
Viewers of Weerasethakul’s films will recognize his serene tone and regular actors, but the images here have a very different feel. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, his regular DoP, was hired to work on Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights, so Weerasethakul teams up instead with rising talent Diego Garcia. His crisp, clear cinematography gives the film a sharp sense of the vibrant, textured surroundings.
Likewise, the meticulous sound design that permeates Weerasethakul’s cinema envelops the viewer from the opening moments, as the rumbling of machinery does battle with the soft susurrus of nature before the film’s first image arrives. An excavator encroaches on the outskirts of the hospital grounds, making mounds of dirt of the encompassing grass. This constructions hints at the world outside of this zone, which acts as a peaceful retreat from the realities that are closing in on the town.
Jenjira finds out from the goddesses that the territory the school is on was once the site of a palace where a war broke out, and that it lies on the bodies of dead kings who still fight out the battles to this day, using the spirits of the sleeping soldiers to do so. The past and present pains of the land – the bodies below and above ground –conjoin in a deceptive repose. A love for the land, the lake that runs through it, and the people who live there, imbues every single frame.
The feeling that something is lost, that something has been betrayed, is a vague undercurrent that is never stated but somehow becomes clear as the film nears its end. Jenjira is taken on a tour through the kingdom that once stood in Khon Kean—only she cannot actually see it. Instead, she is told in detail by Keng what is no longer visible. The invisible past a dream; the present only escapable through sleep; bodies a source of humility and joy. Widner’s limp, familiar to viewers of Weerasethakul’s films, takes on new meaning in Cemetery of Splendour and is the focus in one of the most moving sequences that will remain unspoiled in this review.
The most striking motif of the film (this film’s monkey ghost, I suppose) is the row of glowing rods of light adjacent to the slumbering soldiers’ beds; perpetually shifting shades of blue, red, and green, directing their moods. In one scene, the pulsating primary colors cover a multiplex lobby and the streets of the town, blurring the line between dream and reality. An increasingly fragile and melancholic emotion, bound up equally with love and pain, takes over in the film’s heartbreaking and extraordinary final sequence. You can almost feel the heart of the filmmaker beating as you watch this movie that neither sleeps nor wakes, but exists so achingly, humbly, and splendidly.
4 stars out of 4.