Anocha Suwichakornpong's modest but beautiful new Thai film, Mundane History, which played at the Rotterdam at BAM festival earlier this year and is currently at MoMA's Contemporasian for a week, is a very promising first film. Its deceptively simple story follows the relationship between a recently paralyzed young man, Ake, and the male nurse, Pun, who is sent to his family's mansion to care for him following his accident. Pun encounters bitterness and resistance from Ake and considers leaving, but gradually a relationship of trust and even affection develops between them. There are also subtle scenes of Pun's interaction with Ake's distant father and with the family servants.
The director shows hints of influence from modernist directors like Tsai Ming-Liang (close-ups of a turtle swimming in a tank), Lisandro Alonso (a burst of jarring guitar music over the opening credits), and David Lynch (the droning musical score), not to mention Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the film's divided structure. The chronology of the story is occasionally reordered, which allows for the film's amazing centerpiece, a cosmic view of the universe and an exploding supernova, to take us by surprise. This sequence later turns out to be part of a planetarium exhibit which the two young men are visiting, a setup for a funny scene where they are the only two people in the auditorium trying to decide where to sit. Jeanette Catsoulis in her NY Times review even praises Ms. Suwichakornpong's "ability to depict nongratuitous full-frontal nudity," which is also not a bad reason to see the film.
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