Writing from Cannes Film Festival, I’m intoxicated by the perfume from bare-shouldered fashion and by the transient bliss of art. What is cinema? At Cannes, the world’s most prestigious cine-circus, the definition is what you imagine it to be: here on the red carpet and in the screening rooms, cinema is art, commerce, money, glamour, fashion, politics, passion, activism, frivolity, national pride. Maybe something more. Take your pick.
There is one Thai film invited to screen at Cannes, a de facto representative of the country that lately doesn’t seem to have much to represent. It’s likely that you haven’t heard much about that film in the news, or in mainstream news outlets, television and Thai-language newspapers, since they’re more caught up in the frills and swirls of the red carpet fashion and celebrity tidbits that are also a big part of Cannes.
There were Thai TV crew and journalists as part of the huge delegation flown in by the Ministry of Culture, but unfortunately, they left last Monday, the very day the Thai film Rak Ti Khon Kaen (Cemetery of Splendour) was shown to a rapturous reception and 10-minute standing ovation. There was also a government-sponsored “Thai Night” to promote Thai films, which was all good, though it was a waste of opportunity not to highlight the only film that puts Thailand on the atlas of cinema (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India and most countries whose filmmakers get selected by the festival put on big shows that centre on their films).
Imagine the Olympics without coverage of Thai athletes — that would be odd, if not scandalous. Maybe because sport is firmly, inseparably tied to the idea of nationalism. Cinema is not. In fact, art is not. Because art that slaves under the whip of nationalism has another name: propaganda. And Cannes, for all its eccentricities, is tasteful enough to distinguish one from the other.
Cemetery of Splendour was directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the top prize Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 with the fantastically titled Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The new film has many soldiers in it, most of them lying still in bed after having contracted a kind of sleeping epidemic, their souls reportedly sucked out to fight a war somewhere in the invisible realm. Set in Khon Kaen, the film is in the Isan dialect and has a strong provincial vibe. Gentle, funny and honest, it envelopes you in enigmatic beauty before blurring the line between fact and fiction, dream and reality, history and remembrance.
Actually, the central question of the film is whether we are awake or sleeping, and whether in our state of anxiety we’re even able to know the difference. Cemetery of Splendour is wrought with the director’s personal memories, though it’s also a clear-eyed piece of art that addresses the (semi)-consciousness of our military-ruled Thailand.
What is cinema? Certainly it’s not salvation, not here in the land where art is often defined as visible embellishment, decorative beauty or religious servitude (temples, for instance). Apichatpong’s art, however, offers something more primitive, more animistic, and more like an antidote to the tyranny of the times when the nation is at its absurd crossroads: it’s not salvation, no, but it’s a metaphysical salvation, a diorama of a dimension where the ghost is awake and the men are sleeping. It’s sane and sincere, but it also belongs to the modernist school where art is driven by hidden tension and underground tremor. Nothing is as it seems, because fiction is the reality of cinema. And fiction, immediate or historical, is what convinces us of the false equilibrium we believe we’re living in. This is a film perfect for Thailand, though it’s not clear when or whether it will be shown in the place to which it rightfully belongs.
Here in Cannes, foreign friends have kept asking me to explain the context of the film to them. I try as best as I can, but it’s difficult, partly because I’m not even sure if I understand all the layers of truth and fiction myself. Cannes is famous for its red carpet, its beautiful women and tuxedoed men, and its irresistible allure of cinema as a parallel universe (are those stars real and not aliens?). The festival is also famous because it is a battleground where cinema is politics — of taste, of interpretation, of the changing sensibility. It’s one of the places where art — when it fails to fulfil the imperfection of life — at least fights a war to claim its relevance to the world. To me, Cemetery of Splendour is a fitting example this year.
So, enjoy those pictures from the red carpet; I do too, a lot. Just don’t forget that the real Thailand, less glamorous and more complex, has left its mark at this festival of many dreams.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.