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As Good As It Gets

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Apichatpong Weerasethakul directs "Syndromes and a Century". Set in Thailand, the film's first half sees a pair of medical practitioners (Dr Toey and Dr Nohng) attending a rural hospital in the 1970s. Its second half sees the same characters working in a contemporary urban hospital. Both characters are based on Weerasethakul's own parents.Significantly, Toey and Nohng do not become romantically involved in either half of the film. Indeed, they are oblivious to one another, a facet which Weerasethakul turns into a giant metaphor: what does the world look like when we do not notice one another? What does the world look like when two people do not come together? What does the world look like when we refuse to see, acknowledge or understand what is around us? Weerasethakul's answer is blunt: cold, callous and inhumane."Syndrome's" first and second halves are packed with subtle echoes, all of which point to the effects of a global capitalism which is slowly etching its way into Tailand's rural landscape. Like several of Weerasethakul's films ("Tropical Malady" etc), "Syndrome's" title thus alludes to an all-encompassing illness, a syndrome which its characters are themselves oblivious to. Observe, for example, how Dr Toey repeatedly asks for the definition of DDT (a poisonous chemical), whilst one of Dr Nohng's patients is a kid who has been mysteriously poisoned.Weerasethakul touches upon this "malady of modernity" in other ways. One's man illness shift from "bad karma" to "cholesterol", we watch as religion is slowly jettisoned, Buddhist statues become neglected, lunch breaks are spent discussing ring-tones, Nohng has acquired a bride who is preoccupied with work, alcoholism is on the rise, the young dismiss Chakra, the nervousness of first love is replaced with vulgar erections and the tranquillity of old Thailand is replaced by the whirlwind of urban life. Other scenes allude to different forms of alienation, eyes covered with towels, suns obfuscated by moons, lovers blocked and limbs amputated. If the film's first half seems nostalgically pensive, focused on personal stories and evocative of hazy memories, its second half is angular, hard and cold; body, spirit and environment seem irrevocably torn apart.Weerasethakul extends the film's bifurcation in other directions as well. If the film's first half stresses Nature and greens, its second half stresses urbanity and whites. If its first half stresses the Feminine, its second half stresses the Masculine. And on and on the reversals go. Doctors become patients, desire becomes rejection, community gatherings become isolated events and what were once relaxing activities become signs of anxiety. Whether Weerasethakul believes both worlds have their advantages and disadvantages, that the world itself is made tolerable only when both poles are united like lovers, is left up to the audience to decide."Syndromes and a Century" has been compared to Hou Hsiou-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Ozu and Edward Yang. Its real grandfather, however, is Michelangelo Antonioni. Indeed, the film's references to poisons, as well as a solar eclipse, are obvious nods to Antonioni's "Red Desert" and "The Eclipse", the latter film's climax literally lifted by Weerasethakul for the climax of his own film. But where Antonioni, who tended to focus on self-absorbed elites, was always aware of wider social/class realities, Weerasethakul's "Syndromes" seems oblivious to the more unpleasant divides between urban and rural Thailand.As a love story, "Syndromes" is unconventional. Toey and Nohng never embrace, and Toey spends most of her time pursued by other men. Another romantic subplot deals with a (possibly) homosexual dentist, whose advances are not reciprocated. This dentist sings at local events ("I normally sing of teeth and gums."), a creative outlet which doesn't seem to exist in the film's second half. The film then ends with a satirical montage, the song "Men and Work" playing whilst contemporary Thailand indulges in trendy fitness routines, electric gadgets and kitschy "return to nature" group activities. Like all of Weerasethakul's films, "Syndrome's" is beautifully shot, filled with fields of green, lazy breezes, twittering birds and meditative camera-work. Many regard it as a masterpiece.8/10 - See "Red Desert".

Vague talk of art nine times out of ten will miss the whole point. Critics will enumerate a few themes, but that is repeating words, knowing one word instead of ten things. The main thing is that here we have a filmmaker who knows what it all is out there, or better said: knows how to sculpt currents of life with a clarity that is neither misty-eyed nor cynical, that is both unwavering gaze of the present and mental awareness of broader cycles. Let's see what is all that. The film is split in two halves, both centered around a hospital with recurring characters coming and going. The first half is an idyllic countryside reverie with lush tropical foliage looming outside the hospital windows; it is a love song wafting through the quiet summer night, the sound of crickets carried by the breeze, stories of climbing mango trees and reincarnation, sunlight over green pastures. Inside this part there is another story of denied love but look how gentle the emotional handling; it ends with laughter, with no one needlessly wounded or wallowing in misery, with no judgement and no one's soul exposed except a tiny corner tenderly to us. So the first part is unspooling some lovely mood, simple so you may not think much of the film at this point. Except we have a second part, again in a hospital, repeats the opening shot of the film but now the pov has been reversed—with us 'looking back' at what was being looked at in the first scene. There are several shifts in this second part. Some obvious ones, in time and mood, the hospital now is modern, the mood is sterile, the jungle out the window is now the concrete boom of the big city. A little less obviously: we now miss the rustic gift of wrapped crispy pork, the small talk of musical dreams with the dentist, no one tells stories about mango trees or reincarnation anymore. There is no love song. Traffic instead of crickets.To emphasize this bizarre new landscape of life, there is a sequence starting with when we see a legless man crouching on the floor, a bizarre sight intentionally shot this way to jar. People are being fitted with artificial limbs in the basement, and the imagery though now it makes sense is still depressing by contrast to earlier. Now there's carbon monoxide poisoning.However, other things have not changed. The stone statue of the sitting Buddha is in the same place. The old Buddhist monk still has funny dreams with chicken, still swaps medical advice for herbs that supposedly sooth confused mind. You may appreciate that his memory is better now. The best part is at the level of perception of things. Until the second segment with the drastic shift ahead, we don't know all that tropical bliss and boredom is going to be in the past. Suddenly we have memories of a past life, colored as more pure because we recall it as more pure. It is a bit of a mystery just how this has happened, in physical terms, how the two worlds fit together, which is for the better; this is not to be reasoned with, the insight is of emotional intellect.By this I mean a specific thing, a shift in watching. Now the first part seems more pure, the modern second part more depressing which makes the contrast a little mawkish and the film slightly contrived. But that is in large part in the eye.If you look closer, in the present segment people are no more sullen or hurried, as we'd think normal to show in modern life, than at first. The surrounding world has changed of course, and that does affect the experience of living. Whereas there used to be clean riverwater to bathe one's broken parts in, now the old woman has to conjure the cleansing illusion of healing water. Isn't cinema nothing but a cleansing illusion? It can only have as much effect, as much depth as you let it. This scene is key. Faced with the old crone, the boy does what? Walks away suspicious of the healing effect. Next to traffic and carbon monoxide poisoning, now there is cynicism. So if you, similarly, turn your back on the healing promise of the film and walk away with just an artful assertion of the effects of modernization, you miss the whole reason behind this.It all ends with two unforgettable shots of this cinematic healing illusion in actual effect; everything sucked into the roaring void but that is not the end, the parting shot of public gymnastics in a park shows a renewal and zest for it all to start again, an absolutely marvelous moment.So we've had some expansion of our awareness in the first part because of the freeflow and not knowing where it goes, colored by memory in the second part and contraction as the mind points out logical contrasts between past and present, setting limits to vision because suddenly we define the present by what it's not, the 'purer' past.Now emptying ourselves of all that in the first of the two shots (samadhi), this last shot rings loud and clear, restoring the world to broader dimensions. It is one of the most transcendent moments in film, equal to the dance scene of another Asian film, Sharasojyu.In both cases it is not the shot itself, it is the placement, opening our eyes to it after all we've seen. There are no words, no conventional wisdom for the mind to latch onto except breathing in the air of that one exuberant moment of people.This is what the Buddhist know and cultivate in meditation as prajna or intuitive wisdom, understanding the one root beneath the myriad branches of illusion.Something to meditate upon.

I have now seen three of Apichatpong's films (Mysterious Objects, Blissfully Yours and now this). It finally occurred to me what is going on and why so many people, already enamored of offbeat, experimental and artsy films, still find his work difficult.I really got into "Mysterious Objects" at first, the "exquisite corpse" method and the way a simple story got embellished as he went along. But Apichatpong seemed to lose interest in the narrative, so the film became a static slide show of his travels, losing all of its narrative energy."Sud Saneha" (Blissfully Yours) never got me engaged. It was an agonizing experience in lost opportunity and self-indulgent amateurism.So now, I can say that "Syndromes and a Century" is by far the best of the three. I gave it 6 out of 10.I finally understood that Apichatpong is an artist of still images. He has no idea what to do with emotions or the people who feel them. He just allows them to populate his canvas, and pays no attention to what they do. In fact, if they do nothing and stay still, that's even better.The camera moves from time to time, but that is clearly just giving better depth to his still images. He has no skills in using images that move, other than to take them in in a decidedly passive way. There are times in this movie when it is effective (the steam entering the pipe, for example), but most of the time, it underscores his discomfort with the moving image.I really want to like his films, mostly because here in Thailand, popular culture is so crushing and stifling, anything artistic is like drops of water in a desert. But I can only cut so much slack.

Here there is no story, no beginning or end. Snippets only of the universal experience of memory and feeling. So banal, so beautiful, the camera looks - often from a distance almost in reverie, at the smallest things in our lives. The camera is in fact a detached "third eye" - seeing what we don't focus on, remembering what we have forgotten. The actors (are they actors?) play out their small parts with humor, grace and and sincere naturalism.One of a handful of directors using the unique language of film to its fullest doing what no other medium can do. Touching, funny, hypnotic, complex and simple - Weerasethakul's signature is all over this film - his humanity, his recognition that the unexplainable is present in every ordinary life, that everything is worthy of our attention ...