Syndromes and a Century

The film is split in two and the halves repeat nearly the same scenes. The first is set in a rural hospital: a job interview, conversations in a corridor, a monk with toothache, a doctor's declaration to a woman. In the second the same dialogue is restaged in a modern, sterile hospital in Bangkok and nothing means the same thing. Apichatpong Weerasethakul wrote it out of the years his parents worked as doctors. At one point the camera abandons the characters and drifts toward a ventilation duct. Its release in Thailand was blocked when the censorship board demanded four cuts involving monks and doctors; rather than cut, the director withdrew it. Who it is for: viewers who like slow cinema and films built on formal symmetry. Who it is not for: anyone wanting narrative, since nothing here is concluded.