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the audience applauded

One of my all time favorites.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Blistering performances.

Don't know what the director is trying to tell. This is so monotone, tedious and boring that made me fall in a state of somnolence similar to the one his actors are suffering. Continuous cuts to unconnected scenes, long scenes of nothing happening. Not for me.

"Cemetery of Splendour" is technically immaculate - perhaps the first thing to stand out is the framing; every shot involves near-flawless subject composition, and in such a way that the figures involved do not appear to be arranged in a way chosen specifically for the sake of the framing - instead, everything looks natural. However, with this said, the contents of the film, i.e. the people, only assume such a natural manner for as long as doing so serves the technical aspects of the film. When they do not, however, all naturalism flies out the window - characters seem stilted and awkward, and possess no fluidity or chemistry whatsoever. This same flaw applies to the writing as well - every conversation seems like inane small talk, and any attempt to introduce a weighty theme through conversation only seems like a sudden and clunky interjection, and the conversation still carries on in the same mundane manner. In regards to the themes - they are both daring and interesting. "Cemetery of Splendour" explores themes that are, overall, mystical in their evocation, yet the dull and sterile atmosphere in which they are introduced seems like a vacuum to what breath of life they may bring, and so the themes of the film are left hanging off forced conversations - stunted and immobile. The film also seems to be set in a world wherein mystical notions are so commonplace, that they are often swept amidst the numerous trivial things that happen within a day; machines that affect patients' dreams are advertised as though they were simply handy electronic tools, a dream-interpreter is pointed out by a nurse and described as "talented" as though her job weren't paranormal in the slightest, and the visiting of two deities is treated merely as an uncommon occurrence. The resultant effect is of a narrative that merely hovers about each theme without penetrating the surface, only including them rather than exploring. "Cemetery of Splendour" includes a few odd moments scattered throughout the film, likely in an attempt to spur thought. These include a scene where people, sitting and enjoying a view, play a seemingly spontaneous game of musical chairs, which reoccurs later on; a strange and idle creature floating in a lake, which the main character later recounts as though from a dream; a giant microbe floating through the sky; and a strange editing ploy, wherein an object in the water is examined from one angle, then suddenly examined from the other, creating a jarring and somewhat haphazard effect - this is executed near the beginning of the film, and repeated near the end; among other scenes. Perhaps these moments of strangeness tie in with the film's concluding notion - that the majority of the narrative is a dream co-experienced by two characters, and hence these odd episodes seek to fortify that notion. The film also seeks to tie in two of its overarching presences - the notion of a spiritual battlefield, situated on top of the very hospital that most of the film takes place in, and the continued digging operation conducted upon the hospital's grounds - perhaps the digging is in an attempt to uncover the bodies suspected to be buried there (after all, the film does make several references to "past lives," and it is suggested that the spiritual battle, although being present simultaneously in a seemingly metaphysical manner, is in fact the echo of an actual historical battle). This tie-in, as well as the narrative's initiation and conclusion as a mutual dream, are the only forms of closure within the film, and they are largely unsatisfying. The end result feels as though every dull and strained moment leading up to it was merely in service of something ultimately unrewarding, as fluff stuffing fabric. In addition to this, the director seeks to wield the film's arid style as though it were restraint, by including unprecedented close-ups of characters during some of the film's final scenes, as well as one occasion near the end where the camera moves about its axis - the only point in the film where it does. However, the moments where this restraint is supposed to pay off seem, much like the narrative conclusions, unsatisfying and ultimately a waste of what could've a far more suitable style for a film exploring heavily mystical and even metaphysical themes. Overall, while "Cemetery of Splendour" boosts astounding technical aspects - most notably its framing - and interesting themes often excluded from cinema, the film's lifeless and awkward execution provides no fertile ground for such themes to flourish, and hence the finished piece remains as more of a blueprint than a fully formed vision.

Every moment of this film is enjoyable. For much of the movie, it struck me as no more or less than a solid example of the cinema of auteur Arichitapong Weerasthakul. He is, perhaps, the most sincerely and successfully magical-realist artist that cinema has known. The social rhythms seem utterly naturalistic, even when the main character, an old, recently handicapped hospital worker, is having a pleasant chat with ancient deities. As with early Peter Weir, Weerasthakul's natural landscapes are utterly, well, natural yet they seem to suggest a haunting, an otherworldly force that's face is the world, one which may or may not be benevolent. History, for Weerasthakul, is the haunting of the present and future by past lives and past worlds, spectral- beings that traverse and are traversed by the present. During Cemetery's last scenes I came to think this may be Weerasthakul's most fully realized work. The penultimate shot is extraordinary. The main character stares out at a central square of the village where the film has taken place, which the current government is digging up, presumably to make way for some "modern convenience". Children play over the new ruins like spirits of the future levitating over a present fading into the past. Our lives, our worlds, can only exist atop the ruins and amid the ghosts of the past. Destruction is therefore creation. But that doesn't make destruction, perhaps especially in its contemporary, mechanized form, any less terrifying.

When watching Cemetery of Splendour or any of Weerasethakul's films one needs to recall Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" because any fraught attempts to find out "what it means" is pointless and can only diminish the work. For the first time since Andrei Tarkovsky's death has a director so keenly picked up on Tarkovsky's views of what film could and should be and begun to carry the torch, making each Weerasethakul film a treasure, because it is all about the poetic experience and the boundless possibility of the cinema: film as dream, film as memory, film as history, film as life and most importantly film as a spiritual and seamless transitory mixture of all of the above. His images stick with you for a lifetime. His films roll with associations and pure natural beauty fixating the filmic experience as memories of a collective past, near or distant. He scrapes the subconscious mind, brings the viewer into a sublime world of the surreal, the magical, while managing to remain rooted in reality, and at times in the mundane leisure of a slow-paced life that flows like the Mekong River, a place that Weerasethakul finds himself time and time again.Cemetery of Splendour takes place near the Mekong in Khon Kaen, Thailand, in which Thai soldiers find themselves in an old rural hospital that once functioned as a school, beset by a mysterious supernatural-like sleeping disorder where they sleep nearly non-stop in small cots day and night, occasionally waking up. Nurses and volunteers sit by their besides, talk to them, wash them, etc. The cots are all connected to a series of long curved incandescent tubes that glow gloriously, pulsating vibrant colors from green to red and red to blue and back to green, captured beautifully by Weerasethakul's camera. Outside the government is digging up ground with the rumored intention of relocating the hospital. Children play in the dirt mounds and life happens. These are the parts of Weerasethakul's films that there is no need to explain. It adds dimension to the life that is taking place within the film. It is past, present and future overlapping one another.One of the volunteers is Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner a Weerasethakul regular), a woman that walks with crutches, one leg longer than the other. Jen helps one of the soldiers in particular, a soldier by the name of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi). Something draws her to this boy, maybe because his bed is where her desk once sat years earlier when she attended school there. Weerasethakul is constantly doing this in nearly all of his work, he has an impeccable ability to leave the temporal and spatial planes of existence undefined, allowing them to flow into and through one another whenever the need arises. She states early in the film that she feels as if she had become "synchronized" with the soldiers, a bad sleeper she is sleeping easier now that she is back in Khon Kaen, as if the "soldiers are sleeping for her." She begins to feel that Itt is the son she never had. The scenes in which she bathes him have a beautiful and careful intimacy reminiscent of Camera's nurse character bathing Alicia in Talk to Her. Itt begins to wake up. They take walks, talk intimately about their lives, eat and just as suddenly as he awakes he can fall back to sleep. There is a very interesting character who Jen also befriends rather quickly by the name of Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) a medium who can see into the soldiers past lives while they are sleeping and can communicate with the soldiers in their dreams (and possibly bridge reality and dream between characters). The mood of accepting a ghostly history runs through Cemtery like veins, Weerasethakul blends the supernatural with conservative realism more matter-of-factly than possibly any director before. Jen is a pious woman who takes animal statuettes (that illicit the power of various prayers) to a temple where she goes to pray to two Laotian goddesses. We see her do this with her American husband—Jen's real life husband as well, a way for Weerasethakul to mix fiction and reality—and in the next seen we find Jen in the park eating a snack approached by two women who think her for the animal statuettes that she honored them with. The two women claim to be the long dead Laotian princesses (turned goddesses) that Jen prays to daily, yet the scene takes plays like any other daily meeting; it is this spatial and temporal convergence that marks Weerasethakul's work and only continues to build throughout Cemetery of Splendour. The goddesses also relate to Jen that the improvised hospital is buried on an ancient cemetery for kings and soldiers who continue to do battle without the constraints of life as we know it or time as we know it and they drain the energy from the soldiers which is why the soldiers can never get better. In a place where death, life, past and present are so active one cannot escape the past, for better or for worse; these are the staples of Weerasethakul's world, with the message that says, you might as well embrace the sublimity of it all, because we are surrounded by the ghosts of everything that has come before and will become ghosts as well.