Syndromes and a Century
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The great Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández (Broken Sky) has cited Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul as an inspiration. It must be for the matter-of-fact presentation of gay characters whose longing Weerasethakul obfuscates while Hernández makes it openly, movingly sensual. Hernández finishes what Weerasethakul starts. Syndromes and a Century, Weerasethakul’s latest film, is full of false starts. Its exploration of sexual passion resists Hernández’s wonderment and depth.
Unhelpfully praised as “elliptical,” Syndromes and a Century is a series of poetic flourishes. A Thai nurse intimidates the men she works with at a military hospital while a male dentist, who moonlights as a pop singer, flirts with a saffron-robed monk who is also infatuated with pop. These scenes—repeated across decades—are puzzling without being compelling. It must be this wan quality that explains the inordinate critical acclaim for Weerasethakul over Hernández’s direct profundity. Syndromes and a Century poeticizes frustration; the nurse, doctor, dentist, monk all lack fulfillment which Weerasethakul’s blasé style makes ineffable. He avoids Hernández’s tantalizing evocations of desire and loss.
Instead, Weerasethakul breaks the narrative in half as in his previous Tropical Maladies. Twice-told, his characters’ lives parallel his impoverished country’s society. Repeated motifs (office protocol, heterosexual and homosexual courtship); syndromes (inferiority complexes); patterns (formal and transgressive conduct); and destiny (symbolized by a solar eclipse) only vaguely summarize a nation’s condition. Yet, this allows Western critics to condescend, investing Weerasethakul’s lackluster cinema with inordinate significance. They prefer this bland repetition of what other filmmakers do with excitement. If Syndromes and a Century’s blandness passes for mysteriousness, it indicates a decline in art-cinema culture.
Syndromes and a Century’s reviews feature interpretations seemingly as arbitrary as the film itself, made up from press release clues that it’s about “memory,” “the director’s parents,” Thailand in “the ’70s.” None of this is apparent in the film’s content. The repetitive scenes create an undeniable formal structure, but due to Weerasethakul’s casual rhythms (hesitating to move in on precise emotions), Syndromes and a Century remains light verse, not great poetry. It forgoes the impact of established art about time and experience—not just failing Julien Hernández, but T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes.
This reluctance to accent the dentist and monk’s thwarted communication matches the nurse and doctor’s balked flirtation. Deflating what characters feel results in puzzling scenes: the doctor’s covered-up erection, the dentist offering the monk a CD titled, I Could Only Look. For a culture conversant with Morrissey’s “I Can Have Both”—or anyone who’s seen Broken Sky—Weerasethakul’s tactfulness is exasperating. Syndromes and a Century imprisons the sexes in timidity.
