Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) User Reviews

Creates a mood of tranquility

[howard.schumann · 8/10 · 12 February 2007]

A camera attached to a moving car takes us down a busy city street in Thailand. Abruptly, the car turns into a narrow alley where we see brush grass and run down shacks. As the camera enters one of the houses, a heavy-set woman speaks of the trauma involved in her being sold into prostitution by her father. When she is finished, an off-camera voice asks her to tell another story, real or fiction. It is then that we begin to sense that cinematically we are in unchartered territory. Internationally acclaimed Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first feature Mysterious Object at Noon is an offbeat mixture of reality and fiction in which there is no screenplay or linear narrative, only a story created and added to by each participant in the mode of the French game "exquisite corpse".

The story the woman first tells is that of a teacher named Dogfahr whose young pupil is a cripple confined to a wheelchair. The tale is then dramatized on screen by non actors alternating with the talking storyteller. As the camera moves north and south of Bangkok into the Thai countryside, a cross section of Thai's continue the story by adding a few lines. These include two deaf girls using sign language, a song and dance troupe, and children in a rural Thai school. With each addition, the tale becomes vastly different and increasingly fantastic. The mysterious object in the title falls from the teacher who has collapsed and turns into an extraterrestrial boy with strange powers, a duplicate teacher, and finally a "witch tiger" and a magic sword.

Some sequences stand by themselves and are without any relation to the continuing storyline. The teacher brings her father to the doctor for a hearing test and complains of a strange line around her neck which the doctor dismisses as an allergy or the effect of wearing her necklace. Parents talk of a boy who escaped death in a plane crash because he was protected by amulets, and a scene shows women bargaining at a fish market. An experimental film with a small budget shot in 16-millimeter black and white, Mysterious Object at Noon glows with warmth and playfulness. As it progresses, it also slows down and becomes more of a meditation on Thai culture, creating a mood of tranquility and peace. Like Seinfeld, it is ostensibly "about nothing", but turns out to be about everything.

A Great Experiment In Docudrama

[davidals · 8/10 · 15 September 2003]

*Possible Spoilers*

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul crafted one of the more unique debut films to appear in quite a while with MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON, which generated a significant buzz on the global festival circuit and seems to mark the beginning of a very promising film career.

Weerasethakul's dreamy not-quite-drama, not-quite-documentary opens with a view down a freeway, taking in the skyline of Bangkok (in opening scenes that evoke the infamous 'freeway' scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS), before gliding down a highway exit into progressively smaller side streets, eventually ending up in a neighborhood and finding the first of his many subject/character/author/collaborators (nearly everyone appearing in the film is simultaneously all four). A woman relates a grim, true story and pauses before spinning off into another story, this one invented. Weerasethakul starts with the shard of a story invented here, and - using the Surrealist 'Exquisite Corpse' game/technique - asks everyone else he encounters to add to it - then editing the results (after three years of compiling footage) into MYSTERIOUS OBJECT.

With a story that is invented - as both an experiment in film, and a piece of collectively generated contemporary folklore - almost literally as you watch (excepting Weetasethakul's editing - the finished product was stitched together from 3+ hours of footage), this film shatters all kinds of boundaries - between experimental art and folklore, between fiction and documentary, between numerous stylistic genres, and between author/artist/creative mind and spectator/viewer/consumer. The individuals appearing in the film are non-actors; the story, which starts as a folkloric tale about a handicapped boy and his teacher, veers off into something resembling mythologic sci-fi. Throughout MYSTERIOUS OBJECT, bits of documentary footage suddenly give way to seamless reenactments of the story (as it is being told), often interspersed with 'found' bits of news footage or soap operas (which all seem to end up commenting on the narrative as it evolves); in one scene late in the film, the director and crew step into the film, revealing (in their workmanlike actions) some of the process behind it all, and incorporating that into the ever-evolving story as well.

The cinematography of MYSTERIOUS OBJECT reminded me somewhat of BREATHLESS - the stories are dissimilar, but the grainy, atmospheric black-and-white look is pleasantly similar, and they share an energetic willingness to tinker with notions of what films can or can't be. And - without resorting to exoticism, cuteness or pandering to any outside cultural expectations, a variable view of Thailand is offered, moving with ease across the varied religious, cultural and economic divides in Thai society. The consistently rich and affectionate glimpses of rural and urban landscapes and the diversity of the participants makes for compelling viewing - experimentalist or not, Weerasethakul gives everyone the opportunity to reveal his or her own personality during their shining moment on screen, creating a kaleidoscope of humor, quirkiness and/or mundane realism.

The end result is a surprising mix of the avant-garde and the affectionate, infused with both a great love of intrepid experimentalism and of Thai life and society at its' most everyday and average, and offering a great meditation on creativity as well in this remarkably crafted and most unusual film.

interesting film experiment

[aptpupil79 · 7/10 · 27 February 2003]

there's no real easy way to classify or summarize this movie. at its core there is a story that is developed by many (unrelated) people picking up where the last person left off...a creative game of sorts. the "story" of the film unfolds as villagers of different parts of thailand see fit (with the final cut going to the director, of course). we see not only the creators of the story developing the story that they did not begin, but also the story itself acted out by actors or village people, or sometimes not at all. it's a film experiment more than a film and should be approached as such. the last 15 minutes of the film is more of a documentary of thai people than about the story that has been evolving over the course of the film. it's an interesting view, but not great in any way. C+

Fish sauce abhidharma

[chaos-rampant · 7 June 2013]

An interesting film, more for the idea behind it and moments captured than the overall execution.

A filmmaker rolls around town in search of a story, making the film we see. It begins with long footage of driving around Bangkok, then we segue to the story proper with a woman being interviewed, asked about a story.

The story is made-up, the point is not the story of course, but dismantling the conventional telling. Different people are interviewed who bend the story to their fancy, adding stuff. We are not entirely sure who among them are actors coached on what to say, who are passers-by blurting out what comes in their heads. We can tell that some of it was obviously blocked to be filmed, some covertly staged as real and some stolen from glances but the whole is pretty seamless.

This is an opportunity to film all sorts of activities and splice it together to see what kind of sense comes out; among them an amateur theatric production of the story, a simulated TV interview filmed off the TV, (faux?) newsreel footage, real scenes of boxing, a singing contest and sex show, a scene from the film but the camera keeps rolling through the break. When the crippled boy is assigned a random background by one of the interviewees, in the following scene his teacher acquires the same background of war and family loss.

In the West, we have similar films of stories about stories in Saragossa Manuscript and such, where usually the point is structure, hidden meaning and the divination of self.

In the East, specifically Thailand, they have their own traditions of light storytelling and meta-narrative sorting of concepts, both defined by cultural proximity to India. Among the three 'holy' texts of their native Buddhism is a body of work called Abhidharma, teachings about the teachings. Composed after the Buddha's time, commentaries upon commentaries form a complex, layered web of cataloguing various ontological attributes of reality, phenomena and self. Boring if you ever try to read it.

On a historical note, there is evidence that abhidharmic influence in the north of India in turn rippled West through Persia to influence gnostic thought, and East through the Silk Road as both reaction to its scholasticism and elaboration of it contributed to early Chinese Buddhism. In both cases, the distinction is made between mere intellectual reasoning in the abhidharmic vein, and expansive meditative wisdom that looks directly at things. (respectively, gnosis and prajna)

Anyway, the film has no direct link to all that except as pointing to the mesh of meta-narrative.

And it's cool to note that springing from a Buddhist background, in this film of stories about stories the stories are transient, illusory confabulations, there's no intrinsic meaning or symbolism to them, there's no structure beyond co-dependent arising of narrator and image, and the narrator is neither a single self nor on some journey to enlightenment. Nice, if you don't burden yourself with futilely trying to organize the tangle, just directly look at the wondrous nothingness.

The last story is made-up by schoolchildren, collapsing in a fantastical, meaningless heap of witch tigers and magical swords, illusory child's play.

The closing shots are of children kicking a ball, the rush of actual life outside the stories which is the most mysterious object of all.

Trying To Figure This One Out

[boblipton · 6/10 · 9 September 2019]

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul went around Thailand with a film crew for three years, having what seem to be random people tell a round-robin story. One person would tell one part, then on to the next. It's a technique I've seen used in a couple of amateur-press stories from the 1930s, when professional science fiction writers were cheap -- the line was that WONDER STORIES offered a quarter cent per word, payable upon lawsuit. One writer would start the story, another would continue for a few pages, and so forth.

As a story-telling movie, it's .... well, it's an interesting experiment that does not work. The writers in the 1930s round-robin stories were pros, who understood how plotting worked and how far they could veer. With this one, we watch people do a hard left on the story, argue about what has been been decided earlier in the story. It's less like the way in LOVE ME TONIGHT, the song "Isn't It Romantic?" wafts from Paris to a distant castle, changing to various tempi along the way, and more like the way my great-aunt Esther would tell a story. She would drone on for about thirty minutes, pause to make sure I understood some point -- "...so they had to find the money for the rent. If they didn't pay the rent, they could be out on the street, you know what I mean?" After I would tiredly admit that I understood eviction, she would continue with "So once I knew this guy, I think I met him through my friend Rosie from high school, he had a picture of Rutherford B. Hayes on his kitchen wall next to the electric clock." Then she would talk about the clock for half an hour. Not that there was anything interesting about the clock; had there been, I think, she would never have mentioned it at all.

That's what the story-telling in this reminds me of. Oh, the people are trying to tell a good story, but they lack the training.

What I think this movie works as is a city-symphony picture, one of those movies in the 1920s and 1930s which purported to show you Berlin in BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY or New York in MANHATTA. I think it works better as that, although it's less about the city and the countryside, their institutions and rhythms, than individuals.

A superb, but very strange, film

[Silliman805 · 10/10 · 17 March 2007]

The strangest film I've seen in some time is an experimental docu-drama from Thailand called Mysterious Object at Noon, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai architect who has an MFA in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (which, when you think about it, is a great town for an architect to go to in order to study film). It's not a docu-drama in the American sense of the word, but rather a film that documents a narrative, the tale of a home study teacher and her disabled student. How it does this is what is so unusual. Working for over three years with an all-volunteer cast & crew – which also means an ever-changing cast & crew – Weerasethakul employed the surrealist game of the Exquisite Corpse, which, as described by one web site devoted to this practice,

was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.

Now imagine playing this same game with film, not only with the urban elites of Bangkok, but with villagers in Weerasethakul's native north who have only limited experience with cinema and no real concept of fiction. The results are both primitive and startling. Filmed in black & white with the cheapest imaginable equipment and film stock, Mysterious Object is something akin to a surrealist version of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera set in the Thailand of the 1990s, which means everything from contemporary skyscrapers and freeway on-ramps to elephants wandering into the scene as some boys who've been playing a version of hacky sack try to improvise what might come next. One group of villagers act out their section, which includes music (some of it involving a mouth organ unlike anything I've ever seen before). Another woman, early on, simply tells her own story, which involves being sold by her father in return for bus fare. There is a long truck ride through Bangkok at the beginning that feels like an homage both to Vertov and to Tarkovsky's Solaris until the driver and his partner start trying to sell tuna. During the course of the film, the teacher gives birth – tho that verb phrase doesn't really do justice to what actually happens – to a young man who zips her unconscious body into a closet and ransacks the student's home, World War 2 comes to a conclusion, the populace is admonished to buy American products, aliens invade, and the teacher gets a rash. The young boy is both much loved and abandoned by his parents. At one point, the boy to whom the teacher gives birth turns into a murderous giant. The one element that Weerasethakul uses to keep his various narrative threads from entirely spinning out of control is a small team of actors who periodically act out some of the threads narrated by different speakers.

This film works for many of the same reasons that any artwork that is actively trying to invent its own genre does – in this sense, Man with a Movie Camera, as well as books as diverse as Tristram Shandy, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Moby Dick, Spring & All and Visions of Cody, are almost parallel projects. Each questions everything and makes no assumptions as to how to proceed. In this context, even a wrong decision (presuming of course we could define such) would be a fresh one. At the same time, Weerasethakul clearly understands this role as historical – there is a scene in which the film-maker and his colleagues are walking along & one comments "We should have had a script." The film ends when & where it does because that's where, literally, the film stock Weerasethakul had at his disposal ran out.

If you don't care for experimental cinema, you can almost be certain that you're going to hate this film. Even if you love the work of Stan Brakhage, Warren Sonbert & Abigail Child, you may find it hard to imagine that something like this can still be produced in the 21st century. Would it still hold its fascination if the film were in English about Oakland? Frankly, it might not – Steve Benson, who first turned me on Mysterious Object, calls Tropical Malady, Weerasethakul's other film available through NetFlix, "catastrophically disappointing" tho it won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004. In any event, there is this film, which taken on its own is a dive into a culture – and into a perspective on cinema – that few of us will every have the opportunity to experience directly. As such, it's a trip you should probably take.

exhausting

[phobophob · 3/10 · 30 March 2009]

i took my girlfriend to see this one after reading a very promising article about it in my monthly cinema newspaper. i regretted it after about 15 minutes of the movie. the main idea to it, to let a story develop by it's protagonists, thus making it a semi documentary, seems promising, but suffers under the usual problems movies have that relay on their actors as directors. they are non. so the movie is constantly on the verge of failure, while thru most parts being plain - i am sorry, but i have to use that word - boring. it is, as the short movies of weerasethakul, heavily based on long steady shots and seemingly unconnected pieces of sound and dialog. this may work as an installative work in an art context but definitely fails to deliver when watching it for about 90 minutes in a cinema. the only refreshing moments of the movie are the ones of self reference. one in which one assistant of the director appears, telling him that the whole thing does not work and that they better should have written a script, and one in which a kid actor is asking if he finally can go home (and if not, if afterwords he at least can get a burger at kfc :). i have to admit i really felt with the kid.

Deadbeat Dada

[ThurstonHunger · 3/10 · 25 April 2006]

This approaches art, and does so from an oblique angle and in an exotic locale. That being said for me, it never achieves that art., Despite the loose effort to stitch a thread of a story through this, and some curious disjointed elements, the whole does not hold.

See this film if you are willing to bring a lot to the party. (And kudos to you, [e-mail]) Or play it in your rental store, or during a party with the sound off, and it will probably snare more fish than it does standing alone with you and your remote.

I'm all for experimental film, this could have been whittled down to a 7 minute beauty for the Ann Arbor Film Fest; at 83 min, it came across as a chore, a corpse less than exquisite. And while I'm coming across as the anti-hipster, why black (or almost a dusty brown) and white for this film? Color I think would have made this more florid and captivating, although perhaps more common-place and thus undermined the art?

Wait till your film professor assigns this one to you.

3/10

exquisite? Pas problemes..

[jrlandsverk · 5 May 2003]

The idea of "Exquisite Corpse" has always fascinated me, and I'm happy that there's a movie based around such a unique method of story-telling. The director comments that by the end, it was less about the actual story the villagers were telling and more about the social implications; therefore the movie becomes more of a documentary. I enjoyed this movie but would like to see more movies based on the Exquisite Corpse method, possibly one part going "out into the field" and talking to villagers, gathering the story, and then a second part where either a rehearsed play or actual movie was written given those elements. Mysterious Object at Noon gets an A- from me.

Innovation does not a good movie make

[Sinnerman · 7 December 2003]

"Mysterious" held much dramatic promise.

But because of its hybrid innovation, I'm at a lost as to rate it as a dramatic feature or a documentary film. Either way, despite its critical accolades, it wasn't able to interest me enough to wanna cradle its inadequacies. Poor film making craft is inexcusable even if this feature is excusably in a league of its own. (And did anyone catch a moment of Ozu homage in one of the scenes, with children walking by at one end and the camera placed at another? Nice...)

That said, there were undeniable moments of brilliance in it. Two standouts come to mind; The "banter" between the two mute girls and that staged re-enactment by the villagers. And it shown the director to be one who knows how to capture such cinematic sparks, albeit inconsistently.

I thus hope to see "Blissfully yours" before I decide on my regard for Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a film maker. Similarly, "Mysterious" will be given the benefit of the doubt. For honestly, it just didn't hack it for me right now.