The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul started his critically acclaimed filmography with Mysterious Object at Noon (2000). A monochromatic foray into a country and its people at the turn-of-the-century, the documentary-fiction hybrid is based on the surrealist game exquisite corpse. The game involves participants taking turns to complete an incomplete story, passing along fragmented chapters from one person to the next, gradually completing a picture of chaotic harmony. Involving a diverse group of people from all over Thailand, including food vendors, boxers and students, the story follows a crippled boy and his teacher as an unpredictable series of events come to fruition.
On one level, this debut is an act of meta-filmmaking that contemplates the inherently symbiotic and chaotic nature of making art. But it also seeks to unravel so much more. Weerasethakul takes a cinema vérité approach to documenting his subjects and their wild fabrications. A rich soundscape of roaring engines, radio static, and idle chatter, paired with cinematographer and soon-to-be frequent collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s intimate photography, form a multilayered national image.
The blown-up 16mm film gives every frame a frenetic texture and every scene feels like a lost reel of archival footage from some forgotten past, or perhaps a scrambled transmission from a near future. Documenting the film crew’s two-year journey around Thailand, sitting by train windows or perched at the back of a truck, Weerasethakul repeatedly captures the lush countryside flow past in a static blur. This portrait of his homeland is one that is constantly in motion. Teenagers kicking a rattan ball over a net, droves of people scurrying past a local food market, and two Muay Thai fighters trading blows at the center of a ring. Bodies are always in flux, drifting from one space to the next. Mimicking an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, disparate images merge from one to the next. Sequences abruptly start and stop—the film takes a life of its own until the camera literally breaks at the end. Weersathekul’s debut feature is an early indication of his defiant cinematic vision, which addresses national concerns through personal stories.
Although the scars of militarism and political repression linger in the background, Mysterious Object at Noon largely focuses on the quotidian rhythms of daily life in Thailand. From the congested streets of Bangkok to the far-flung dirt roads of the north, Weerasethakul spotlights the warmth and dynamism of the mundane. His proxy storytellers aren’t merely nodes to push a narrative forward, they are the focal point—their desires, fears, and superstitions all floating beneath the surface of their mythical fabrications. For 83 minutes, Thailand’s jungles are not a site for sensationalized bloodshed or exoticized beauty, but a meditative birthplace of stories.
Mysterious Object at Noon screens this afternoon, September 29, and on September 30, at Metrograph as part of the series “Rabbit on the Moon.”
