Mysterious Object at Noon

In a nutshell, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (say that five times fast) wanders through the whole of Thailand, capturing random people as they tell random stories. Fir 85 minutes we overhear radio broadcasts and hear fanciful tales, largely set against the backdrop of the ridiculously poor. The stories aren't really related, and they aren't necessarily true and they aren't necessarily fiction. It's a curious documentary on the subject of... absolutely nothing.

Shot with a 16mm camera that fades in and out of focus (and with a varying exposure that sends the film careening from complete darkness to full white-out), it's difficult to say there's much mastery in Weerasethakul's 85-minute production. If he'd done this in America, the film would have been dismissed as art-school crap (at least if it was not the work of Errol Morris). But over-nice critics see this as genuine entertainment because it's so down-to-earth and in a foreign language.

Sadly, it isn't more than an oddball experiment and a failed one at that. There's no lesson about humanity here, no insight into the Thai people. And it's dismal from a technical perspective aside from a handful of quirky shot setups. A spare few engaging speakers make some of these stories worth hearing but most are not... unless listening to someone read an unyielding list of prices at the local market sounds like your cup of tea.

Aka Dokfa nai meuman.