MEKONG HOTEL B-
Thailand Great Britain (61 mi)
2012 d: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Don’t look for camera movement in this film, as there isn’t
any, but it does continue the director’s fascination with actress Jenjaira
Pongpas that goes back to SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), still, arguably, the
director’s best effort. This film takes
place entirely on the premises of the Mekong Hotel in northeast Thailand,
an upscale resort with a balcony overlooking the Mekong
River, perhaps the real subject of
the film, with the banks of Laos
seen on the far shore. With no backstory
to actual events in August 2011, the film was shot just after heavy rains
caused disastrous, months-long flooding by the Mekong River (see photos
here: Worst
Flooding in Decades Swamps Thailand - In Focus - The Atlantic), where
reportedly 37 villages and up to 5000 homes were destroyed in the floods. You’d never know any of this initially, as the
camera has a quiet, meditative gaze at the river gently flowing downstream, with
classical Spanish guitar blues and jazz accompaniment from Chai Bhatana, who is
seen briefly chatting with the director before resuming his performance, which
may actually have been his audition, eventually playing a guitar improvisation throughout
the entire length of the film, initially gorgeously atmospheric, but overused,
becoming tedious by the end. There’s an
introductory bit of flirtatious banter between Phon (Maiyatan Techaparn) and
Tong (Sakda Kaewattana) on the balcony, as if they’re just growing attracted to
one another, giving the film a romanticized view of the hotel. But we eventually learn they are already
lovers, where Weerasethakul's gentle style is so rhapsodically slow that
viewers can altogether miss the most bizarre occurrences, where Phon
communicates with her dead mother, Auntie Jen (Pongpas), but is viewed onscreen
like any normal person, knitting furiously while chatting with her
daughter.
Jen is described as a Pob spirit, perhaps a malevolent Thai
spirit that feeds on humans and livestock, which is in evidence several times
during the film, often to humorous effect, where we see spirits secretly
gorging themselves, much like wild animals. Like most recent
Weerasethakul films, this self-described essay, or “a contemplation on making a
fiction,” also weaves its way between the realism of a documentary film and the
fictionalized realm of the supernatural, where at one point we hear “Nobody
questions the existence of the spirit,” a Buddhist reference to the living and
the dead coexisting in harmony. Within this setting we hear TV broadcasts
mention a catastrophic flood ravaging through Bangkok, where Jen recalls
disasters in her youth, the 1970’s armed conflict between Communist Laos and
Thailand, when she was an 18-year old girl being trained by the Thai government
to shoot an M16 rifle, claiming she was a good shot, where a flood of refugees
crossed the border into Thailand to escape the military grip of Communist rule.
In each generation, past and present, the suggestion is the government’s
handling of disasters is inept, where the insatiable appetites of the Pob
ghosts can be seen as a metaphorical reference to the government’s own
insatiable greed and corruption. Written, directed, filmed, and produced
by the director, the sparse dialogue spends too much time with ghosts exploring
similar territory as earlier films TROPICAL MALADY (2004) and UNCLE BOONMEE WHO
CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), never really registering the devastating
human impact of the flood raging outside. Continuing his languorous
style, using exclusively static shots, the film settles its reverent gaze upon
the river itself in extended final shots, where the modernity of jet skis on
the river ultimately sets the tone for the relative indifference of the present.
