Mysterious Object at Noon

• Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: Avant-garde / Experimental
• Movie Type: Essay Film, Biography
• Themes: Benign Aliens, Kidnapping, Man's Best Friend
• Release Year: 2000
• Country: TH
• Run Time: 83 minutes

Plot

An adventurous experiment in cinematic storytelling, this low-budget independent Thai feature is structured like the Surrealist idea of the "exquisite corpse." One person begins a story, and a succession of others continue it in whatever way they see fit. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul gleans his participants from all over the Thai countryside. The story, begun by a young woman with a personal history harrowing enough for its own movie, concerns a wheelchair-bound boy and his enigmatic tutor Dogfar. As the tale is passed along between a variety of rural characters (including, at one point, a traveling dance troupe who perform it for an audience), everything from kidnappings to space aliens are added to the mix. The film alternates between the storytellers and the story they tell, along with "behind the scenes" shots and other documentary footage that blur the line between fiction and non-fiction and make the film itself a witty, quirky exploration of the very notion of storytelling. ~ Tom Vick, All Movie Guide

Review

An unusual, if ultimately soporific, blend of documentary and narrative filmmaking, Mysterious Object at Noon is stubbornly indefinable. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, arguably Thailand's most internationally acclaimed filmmaker, has crafted an elliptical and genuinely experimental work that challenges our notions of authorship, authenticity, and narrative. The idea behind it is nothing if not intriguing: a story comprised of the different contributions of various people, whom Weerasethekul finds in his journeys across his native land. The resulting chain story -- told by the participants directly to the camera, interspersed with its interpretation by actors -- is a freewheeling mishmash of fantasy and folklore, at once conceptually fascinating and borderline incoherent. Filmed in grainy black and white, Mysterious Object at Noon is an intertextual experience, incorporating theater, literature, television, oral traditions and cinema verite in its approach. Interesting though it is as an avant-garde exercise, the movie eventually succumbs to longeurs, as it fails to sustain its conceptual novelty for the length of its slight running time. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide

Credit

Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Director

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