Thai filmmaker Jakrawal Nilthramong decided to follow the path of his compatriots Anocha Suwichakornpong and the much more famous Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the favorites of European festivals, by filming a mystical slow-burning drama in which the past and the present seem to begin to merge. “Anatomy of Time” had its premiere in the Horizons section of the Venice festival, and it is a hermetic film that stands out for its great photography and highly aestheticized style, slow pace and non-linear narration. As the name suggests, time plays an important role here, and we follow two narrative lines that are separated by 40 or 50 years, and we will realize that these stories are very much connected.
In the beginning, we meet an old woman who takes care of an old and infirm man who is lying on a bed and looks more like he is dead than alive. Then we go several decades into the past and meet a girl named Meam, who is actually the same old woman from the beginning of the film. A half-dead old man whom no one loves and everyone despises, decades earlier he is a soldier who will court Meam, and all this happens during one of the civil wars, guerilla clashes or coup attempts, because there was no shortage of all this in recent Thai history. It is a secretive, mystical and rather hermetic film, a philosophical drama that tries to play on some inner, sensory level. It is a film that requires patience and that does not offer concrete answers, but rather leaves some clues from which the viewer must assemble a mosaic.
In parallel, Nilthramong tries to weave the story of the sad fate of one woman and the story of the tragic and violent past of his country, which is obviously still deeply woven into the subconscious of the inhabitants. It is difficult to distinguish who is positive and who is negative, and that this old man, who is barely mobile today, once did ugly things, we can also see from the attitude of others besides the old woman towards him. When he escapes from his bed and heads to the village, everyone insults him and chases him away, and it seems that the nurse wants to increase his suffering, not help him. It mentions something like the Thai Young Turks, as the faction in the Thai army was called that tried to carry out several coups, and for years there was also a guerilla war between communist rebels and government forces.
These were wars in which it was not really known who was fighting against whom, and in some short and most memorable episodes of this film we understand what cruelties those were. How probably people from the same villages went to war against each other, massacred each other, and all that violence and all those crimes had to have consequences for later generations as well. It’s a strange film that will definitely not be to everyone’s taste, at times tiring and closed, and at times impressive and shot in wonderful locations and with long shots of incredible nature, the viewer seems to have to ask himself what is the meaning of all this suffering and how much of it man can actually bear.