Mysterious Object at Noon
With Somsri Pinyopol, Duangjai Hiransri, To Hanudomlapr, Kannikar Narong, Kongkiert Komsiri, and Mee Madmoon.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I don’t want to suggest that I know much about Thai cinema. But the two most memorable Thai filmmakers I’ve encountered–the radically different Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul–confound the stereotypes so thoroughly they make it clear that we Americans don’t know what Thai cinema is.
I attended the world premiere of this film at the Rotterdam festival two years ago, and I remember wondering how long it would take to reach Chicago–if it ever got here. The film made a strong impression on me, but I forgot many details, simply because I didn’t have an analytical context in which to place it. Perhaps if the film had been less original or striking, I and other publicists, journalists, and teachers could have started packaging it immediately.
In a famous game of the Surrealists, “The Exquisite Corpse,” participants made up successive parts of a story, sentence by sentence, on a piece of paper with many folds, each participant reading only the previous sentence before adding another. The game of Mysterious Object at Noon–whose title obviously refers to the film as well as the object that rolls out from under the teacher’s skirt–is played somewhat differently, but it has the similar effect of revealing the collective unconscious of a group of unconnected storytellers. These people include, as the Rotterdam festival’s catalog puts it, “quarreling food sellers, a TV-addict-cum-boxer, a devout female cop and a loveless rubber-tree peeler”; we also encounter, among others, a herd of elephants and “a deaf neighbor who is introduced as a silent witness”–actually two deaf neighbors, teenage girls who use sign language to correct and amplify each other’s testimony. At the end, schoolchildren take over the entire show; the “noon” of the title apparently refers to a time when they play outdoors.
