In a defining moment during Cemetery of Splendour, Weerasethakul conjures up a scene that seems to encapsulate the essence of his films. Jen sits on a park bench and is approached by two young women. During their conversation it is revealed that they are the princesses of the shrine Jen had recently paid respect to. Jen is astounded but accepts this as truth and continues to converse with the princesses. The princesses are plain-clothed and humble, talking about commonplace things like the taste of fruit and Jen’s American boyfriend. Just like the princesses, Weerasethakul dresses the extraordinary in ordinary clothing, thus elevating the everyday to the realm of the magical.
The Thai director is similar to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu in this sense. Ozu drew meaning from the seemingly insignificant, like the sword from the stone, creating intricate worlds of beauty before his still camera. Weerasethakul utilises a still camera too, his only moves once in the entirety of this film. What is extraordinary about Cemetery of Splendour is the unseen, the haunting presence of other worlds just out of view of his camera, but not of his characters. There is a kind of spectrality at play, looming just over the shoulder of our vision, acting like a ghostly palimpsest of layers of what we can actually see.
The film focuses on a hospital for soldiers with a condition that leaves them in a long and impenetrable sleep. At their bedside sits Jen and a young psychic. When the psychic enters the soldiers’ unconscious world, she reveals that the hospital is built upon an old cemetery of kings, and that the soldiers are fighting a grand battle, deep in the recesses of the unseen. In an extraordinary sequence, the young psychic embodies one of the soldiers and shows Jen around the luxurious palace of one of the kings. As they walk through an overgrown woodland she points at trees and bushes, saying that they are the magnificent walls and columns of the palace. Jen gazes on in astonishment, and the world becomes another, a world of imagination built atop the physical.
In the woodland, Weerasethakul’s camera frames a sign nailed to a tree. It reads: Time left unused is the longest time. In his reflective shots of Jen’s everyday existence, the director uses time as meditation, a visual tome poem set to a score of crickets chirping, wind whistling through leaves, silence, and the far off rumblings of the world. The time he leaves unused is that which Jen witnesses in an astonishing final shot, her eyes gazing out beyond our vision and comprehension, towards the unseen horizon of another universe.
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