TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE
An edgy, vital political documentary − which people in the Kingdom will not get to see
This is a note on an important Thai film that is unlikely to be shown in Thailand. Such is the fate of home-grown cinema in a time of disease, the time of a black hole. Thunska Pansittivorakul’s and Harit Srikhao’s Homogenous, Empty Time (or Soonyakarn) is however showing this week at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, after its premiere last December at Singapore International Film Festival. That everyone else can see it and local audiences won’t be able to is symptomatic of the mentality that is the essential discourse in this non-fiction film.
Homogenous, Empty Time traverses the far North to the Deep South, smuggles itself into the most guarddown moments of teenage boys, observes heaven and hell as imagined by Buddhist temples and Catholic schools, embeds in a right-wing group gathering, visits a lesbian couple in Pattani, and recounts the story of state oppression on taboo breakers — namely the lèse-majesté law. In nine episodes of off-the-cuff observations and interviews, the film probes the ideological underpinnings and nationalistic superstructure that dictate the consciousness of Thailand, or perhaps the subconscious of its people, programmed since young by the official narrative and sharpened by the postcoup climate.
The title Homogenous, Empty Time is a term coined by the philosopher Walter Benjamin and later interpreted by Benedict Anderson, a respected scholar of Southeast Asia, in his seminal book Imagined Communities that dissects the concept of nation building. In simpler words — and there’s no way to make this simple — it refers to how the concept of time is homogenous to all people in a particular place, even though these people are strangers to one another, and how this homogeneity promotes the shared idea of a nation and, in turn, nationalism.
Thunska’s and Harit’s film portrays this by stringing seemingly unrelated segments to construct a larger portrait of a nation that is held together, psychologically, by the pillars of nation, religion and monarchy. Six of the nine episodes in the film have existed before as part of a television documentary Klang Muang ( In The City), and three are new. We are taken inside an all-boy Catholic school — into their bedrooms where they discuss masturbation and size of penises — to a temple’s museum depicting ghouls from hell, to a village scout seminar, as well as to the violence-plagued Deep South. Altogether, it’s a portrait of post-coup Thailand where the military reigns supreme and the militaristic mentality is omnipresent. The film also recalls the case of Pornthip Munkong, who was jailed for lèse-majesté after performing a play called The Wolf’s Bride.
The iconography of power is everywhere in the film — flags, billboards, posters, statues, PM Prayut Chano-cha on TV — towering above the boys and the people struggling to make sense of them all.
In a way, Homogenous, Empty Time bears a resemblance to another unreleased Thai film, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery Of Splendour, since they both look closely at the structural forces of systematic mind-washing and national hypnotism. Along the way, both films also manage to find intimacy over the surface of turbulence.
But because this is Thunska, a sense of mild provocation is palpable. This is a filmmaker who since the mid2000s provoked discussion with his frank depictions of sexuality, teen angst and millennial idleness in films such as Voodoo Girls and Happy Berry — and later use it as a political commentary such as This Area Is Under Quarantine, which was duly banned. In Homogenous, Empty Time — perhaps his best film to date — his style is more mature, his anger well-placed, and his ability to create awkward tension from ordinary images is sublime. From the shot of boys in a communal shower to a historical recollection of a student massacre, this is a film that borrows from both Walter Benjamin and Larry Clark, from a philosopher and a pornographer, from pundits and voyeurs, from political scholarship as well as visual terrorism.
Thunska said he wanted people to see “glimpses” of what’s going on in the country. He has no wish to pass judgement, to say what is what, and it’s up to the viewers to decide. But to decide, it seems, we have to see the film, and the fact that we won’t be able to means the void at the centre, the “empty time” of the title, will remain there, agape like the mouth of a black hole that will never be filled any time soon.
The film probes the consciousness of Thailand, programmed by the official narrative and sharpened by the post-coup climate