Australian Centre for the Moving Image: In her debut feature, young Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong reveals an eye for the minor duties and small diversions of everyday life that are the surface beneath which she takes on the metaphysical, political and, as the title suggests, historical. Mundane History is a contained portrayal of an almost hermetic world that gradually expands, in miniscule fits and cosmic leaps that prove unpredictable but ultimately hard to deny. The director’s intentions are somewhat clear, even as she refracts the narrative and bestows tangents on the storyline.
The victim of an unspecified accident that has left him a paraplegic, Bangkok teenager Ake comes home from hospital to a life that is without change, let alone purpose. Watched, but not really spoken to by his wealthy, aloof widowed father Thanin (Paramej Noieam), the boy is placed into the trained care of the diligent male nurse Pun (Arkaney Cherkham). Requiring a wheelchair, yet living on the second storey, the boy lapses into disaffected silence, treating his unresponsive body as the site for a non-violent protest that sees his working arms as still as his legs.
When Pun dozes one evening while sitting in Ake’s room, the teenager finally speaks: 'You were talking in your sleep," he observes, and that sense of the ordinary happening in an unexpected state can be applied to Suwichakornpong’s movie. As with another notable Thai release, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, it was edited by Lee Chatametikool, and the narrative is gently fractured and reassembled; Pun carries a wet Ake into his room and dries him, in the next scene the pair are outside as the clouds burst.
Stillness to the point of stasis envelopes the house ('everyone here is just soulless," Pun tells a phone call recipient), and the director alternates between a camera that floats on uneven pockets of air and locked-off appraisal. The latter proves more telling, particularly an extended shot where Thanin arrives home by car, parks outside his house and then goes inside only to re-emerge on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. The state of the house – which has a classic upstairs/downstairs divide – is conveyed in his unyielding demeanour.
Gradually such scenes make explicit a commentary on Thai life, with Ake’s accident a metaphor for defeated protest and broken idealism. A 2001-like astral journey that ends with a planet going supernova and exploding punctuates the story, and a narrator later laments that 'after it explodes, a star goes dark". Posit Thanin as the ruling class, Ake the next generation denied, and Pun as the diligent proletariat that has no time for their struggle because survival comes first.
But rather than play out this triangle, Suwichakornpong eschews answers and instead concentrates on images of rebirth: beginning with the cleansing water and growing more explicit, until the picture’s denouement takes in several reasonably graphic minutes of an unknown woman’s caesarean delivery. The baby’s screams are the primal contrast to the strangely serene world Mundane History creates, and a fittingly oblique end to a movie that will divide audiences.
