My love for experimental film has growing bigger and bigger the last years, and one of the movies I've been looking forward most to see is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon. The director is letting the working class of Thailand improvise a story about a handicapped boy and his strange teacher. We begin with a woman selling tuna from a truck telling her lifestory, until she's asked to tell a story herself and from there the story is told all over Thailand, by different people in all ages.
Apichatpong also dramatizes the story, but also with different people, no actors of course, just normal people trying to tell a story. Sometime the filming is stopped and he even shoot the break or when the actors are rehearsing their lines. There's no rules, except keeping the story moving. The cinematography is black and white, very simple and documentary. The movie was made during three years, and is very abstract but also very free. This is so far from a controlled movie you can come. It's organic, intelligent and very absurd.
The story that's evolving goes from social realism to science fiction, and everything is tied together very interesting in the end. The longer the movie goes, more documentary and less conventional movie.It's hard to explain this movie, and it was quite far away from what I had expected when I first heard about it. But this is that kinda of movie that makes me feel alive again, after one empty movie after another. Not that it's nothing wrong with explosions, gore, car chases, monsters and martial arts - I love that stuff - but if you eat something good over and over again, it will soon loose it's taste.
That's why I'm happy that movies like Mysterious Object at Noon exists - to give me a little vacation until the next rubbermonster falls into my lap.
