FANTASY FARM
What basically distinguishes Mysterious Object at Noon from his subsequent films is its rich and varied social observation. A multitude of locations and interlocutors, linked together, of course, by a loose narrative they weave themselves (and thus hardly interrelated at all); pole dancers, markets, middle school students, an elderly alcoholic storyteller, barrooms, a village theater troupe. Not much obvious direction of the actors. As previously noted, this is a fictional documentary, and there is little distinction between the two genres. This is already explicit in the second sequence. A woman very movingly explains how her mother sold her as a child. Then an off-camera voice asks her to tell another story; true or false, it doesn’t mat- ter. Every story is a story, and thus fiction, just as soon as it is frozen in film. For viewers familiar with Weerasethakul’s work, Mysterious Object represents a fantasy farm where the fantasies of the next fifteen years were cultivated: a tiger, a handicapped teenager (and then a cohort of sick or disabled people, from the peeling boy in Blissfully Yours to the hospital patients in Cemetery of Splendor. Manipulable, stretched bodies whose owners lift themselves up or drag themselves along, desirable bodies, perhaps because they are constituted of nothing but phantom members. In a sequence in Syndromes and a Century, a limbless adolescent crawls along the ground while making a sound like the smack of a tennis ball, only to be followed in a counter shot of a similar but fully limbed boy with a tennis racquet. Or maybe it’s the same boy, because the doctors who run across him say, “It seems like you’re doing better.” At death the soul transmigrates (like Uncle Boonmee who remembers his previous lives) and undergoes a transubstantiation: the boy in Mysterious Object is transformed into his teacher, the volunteer storytellers imagine, because he missed her. There is no rational remedy for sickness and loss (of a loved one, of one’s life). In all of Weerasethakul’s early films there is a scene in which a woman doctor talks to monks or hypochondriacs who try to get her to write them a fantasy perception. But in every family and relationship, the ghosts of the deceased speak to each other gently. In a way, one could take their place if one wanted to. Thus queer disidentification can lead to healing: “Everything is possible.”
Éric Loret Translation, L-S Torgoff