Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)

Not rated, and I don't even know what you could rate this movie.  It's almost stream of consciousness.  There really isn't anything all that offensive. At one point, the narrative shifts to the teacher being a dancer, with the implication that she might be a stripper.  But nothing is ever shown that might be even slightly offensive.

DIRECTOR:  Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Ask me if I want to write even a few words about this movie.  The answer is a resounding, "No!"  I have no desire to write right now, but I really don't want to write about this movie.  I know I have nothing of substance to contribute to the discussion about this movie and that makes me a bad blogger.  Honestly, I ran into a unique set of circumstances while trying to watch this movie that makes me completely underqualified to write about this movie.  I watched the first hour on a treadmill, not understanding a bunch of it.  I then Wikipedia'ed it, understood something absolutely crucial to watching this film and finished the movie.  What I should do is rewatch the film with the important piece of knowledge that I should have gotten and then write about it.  But the problem was...I really wasn't having a good time with this movie. I can't imagine sitting through it again, especially after just powering through it the first time.

The funny thing is, I thought, "A Thai movie from 2000?  How exciting."  But then I found out that it was filmed in 16mm black-and-white and then blown up to 32?  Come on.  It's almost like the director desperately wanted to look like a movie from a bygone era.  It's like the movie was trying to spend all of my goodwill.  It's an obtuse film that doesn't look very pretty and really asks you to invest in that premise.  I tried, guys.  I was excited.  With a movie named Mysterious Object at Noon that was made in 2000?  That should have been completely up my alley and it did borderline nothing for me.  It's not even a one-star movie.  I can at least have a strong opinion about a one-star film.  This is 2 out of 5 (something that I never mention in my film blog.  That's usually reserved for Letterboxd).  It just is nearly impossible to write about this without having an insane level of investment that I just didn't have.  If this movie is great to people, good.  Continue it being great.  This hit none of my buttons, mainly because I refuse to watch it again so soon with the knowledge I now have.

The knowledge I gained, by the way, was that this movie is done in the "exquisite corpse" fashion.  I've learned this term before, but I rarely run into actual examples of it in practice.   An exquisite corpse is a type of art that starts with one person coming up with a premise that people continually contribute to and add to the original piece.  The goal of the exquisite corpse is that we should have something very different than what we started with at the beginning.  It is a communal experience that is more about the relationships between artists than the final product that is actually made. Here's the problem.  I walked into this movie wondering if it was a documentary or a fictional narrative (or a weird hybrid of both.)  From my perspective, there were moments that felt really grounded and real.  People seemed to be talking about real problems and real issues and I thought the movie was a study of life in Thailand in 2000.  But then we'd have a scene that was acted out. Then it got bizarre and borderline silly with some of the choices.  What started as a story between a teacher and a student became an alien doppleganger story that had almost no consistency between the other scenes.

Now, what I assume was supposed to be the takeaway in this film was the myriad of personalities in this village in Thailand. The things that was a unifying force was the story that was being grown between the many many people involved in telling the story.  The moments where we got to see people just exist in Thailand was interesting in the same way that the Maysleses had with cinema verite documentaries.  I actually really like those documentaries a lot and there are elements of that inside Mysterious Object at Noon.  But every time I would get invested in something real, we were thrown back into the exquisite corpse.  And I'll tell you what?  I don't care about that story.  Storytelling is a specific thing.  Maybe this is me gatekeeping more than I should, but the practice of the exquisite corpse, from my limited snobby perspective, should be a showcase of talent.  What we get with the exquisite corpse is a reminder of why improv and understanding of structure really matter.

There was a comic book and an adapted cartoon of something called Axe Cop a while ago.  I never got into it.  I read a little bit of it and it wasn't for me.  The conceit of Axe Cop was that a comic book writer / artist took an improvised story by his son or nephew and adapted the story quite seriously.  The joke was that the narrative was absolute chaos.  Kids aren't really all that interesting storytellers.  The main reason that kids aren't all that interesting storytellers is that everything is about escalation.  Everything has to be more interesting than the previous scenes.  I'm not saying that I'm perfect at that.  Everyone struggles with storytelling.  But that's why authors plan.  Some authors can even pull off the exquisite corpse model.  There was a run of comic books (I think about Ka-Zar and the Savage Land and another with Spider-Man...) that used the exquisite corpse conceit to tell the story.  The point was that one author would write a story about the protagonist, putting him in a seemingly unfathomable cliffhanger.  There seemed to be no way out.  The goal of the author was to dig a really deep grave and see if another author could dig his or her way out.  It was a fun game.  But those were authors who knew structures and could plan before improving the whole thing.

Listen, I'm spiraling.  I don't mind spiraling in a blog like this because I don't have a lot to contribute.  For all of my textual vomit that I'm offering here, I understand it isn't about the quality of the exquisite corpse in Mysterious Object at Noon.  The point is that we get this insight into Thai culture and the people who contributed to this story over a dedicated amount of time.  I get that.  We all acknowledge that the story that was created is probably a bit of crap.  They didn't even film the last sequence with the boys and the tiger, mainly because you couldn't have multiple tigers and aliens fighting on this kind of budget.  The movie even reminds me in what seems to be an after-credits sequence that the story doesn't matter.  We see footage of people playing soccer and having a good time in this village.  Heck, we almost get ten whole minutes of just coverage of people doing innocuous things because the director is reminding us that his is about the people, not the story.  

But then why invest so much time in the adaptation of the exquisite corpse?  Honestly, that was the stuff that drove me more crazy.  It seems like there needed to separate this documentary from others which are just analyses of the human person.  Part of the exquisite corpse is a question asking "What is art?"  I don't know if the Mysterious Object story really at all tries to answer that question.  If anything, it is an attempt to rein in chaos.  Again, if it is just about the people, then we get to see people having a good time contributing to a greater tapestry.  But the actual art itself is honestly pretty darned terrible and inconsequential.  (See?  I'm back to griping about this.) What's worse is that the Mysterious Object story is just distracting from me getting to know these interesting people.  There's a couple arguing on a train.  I want to know all about them.  Instead, we're desperate to get back to this story that's just unintelligible.  

I know that I'm going to login to Letterboxd and it's going to be a 4.0 or something.  I'm just going to be sad because my dumbness didn't really give me a good insight into what this movie could be.  If I write any more, you know I'm just trying to pad out a bad film blog.  Maybe there's something good that I should have picked out, but I almost just left frustrated with this movie.  Meh.