‘Arsenals’, the 21^st Riga International Film Festival has begun, running from the 10^th­–18^th of September 2011. Invited as a member of the FIPRESCI critics’ jury, I’ll be focusing mainly on the newest Baltic cinema. Today, though, I had a chance to catch a film from the festival’s International selection.

 

The very title of Sivaroj Kongasakul’s Eternity (Tee Rak, 2010) portended a slow-moving start to my festival experience. Described as ‘meditative’, ‘atmospheric’ and ‘poetic’, the film tells the story of a ghost who re-visits the house he grew up in, and remembers the life he lived there. It sounded suspiciously like another recent Thai feature, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives. Beyond their stately pace, however, the two films have a decidedly different feel.

 

Uncle Boonmee was intense in every way, with vivid colours, an ominous atmosphere of magic realism, and long takes containing no action or dialogue, forcing spectators to confront an insistent emptiness. The opening of Eternity seems to set the audience up for a similarly challenging film. It involves just one man who is filmed in long takes where nothing is said and not much happens. This sequence lasts only 10 to 15 minutes, though, and gives the audience a cool-down period during which they disconnect from the outside world, and acclimatise to the film’s milieu of calm. The man is a ghost, revisiting the spaces he knew when he was alive; this also gives the audience a chance to become familiar with these spaces before the start of the story that will take place within them. In the following two sequences, a long central one and a short epilogue, the film moves into a different meditative mode. The central sequence immediately establishes a relaxed atmosphere of simple contentment found in the everyday life of people at ease with each other. The film is also infused with the languidness of the summer heat, which seems to have leached the colour from the film’s images, leaving them washed out.

 

Eternity’s main sequence focuses on a young couple: Wat has brought Koi, a city girl, to visit his family in the countryside. She helps with meals and washing dishes, chats with her boyfriend’s little brother about school, bonds with his aunt, and visits a mountain-top temple with Wat, who tells her how the landscape was shaped by battles between the gods. The film’s tendency towards long shots creates a respectful distance from the characters being observed. The audience listens in on all their conversations: mildly interesting exchanges perfectly balanced with comfortable silences. The topics, while largely everyday, could be interpreted symbolically: they aren’t obviously significant, though, making the dialogue in Eternity far different from the sparse but weightier words of Uncle Boonmee.

 

One area where Eternity could have learned from Uncle Boonmee is in its exposition. While the latter film helpfully advertised its magic realism with fantastic creatures and characters who fade in and out, Eternity is excessively coy about its supernatural element. If you haven’t read the film’s synopsis, it would be difficult to guess that the man in the prologue is a ghost, and the film’s epilogue is even more confusing. As many boring films have proven, though, it is not easy to make a slow film that is both engaging and relaxing for the viewer, yet in Eternity, his first feature, Sivaroj Kongasakul has achieved precisely this.