Venice. Sang Sattawat.

"Unconventional enough to please fervent admirers of his previous work like Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century is, even more than its precedents, a visual notebook that resists all temptation to opt for a narrative, instead staying faithful to its enigmatic title," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily, who finds "hints at Buddhist speculations on previous incarnations and relationships with the spiritual world."

Noting that the film is part of Vienna's New Crowned Hope celebration of Mozart Year 2006, Variety's Leslie Felperin adds that the film doesn't have much to do with Mozart at all, of course, nor was it meant to. "Even so, at a stretch pic's structure could be described as somewhat fugue-like with its play of repetitions with variations." Syndromes "teeters just on the edge of abstraction, especially given the helmer's fondness for holding for long, beautifully composed takes that drink in sun-dappled landscapes, corridors and statues" and "casts a witchy kind of spell with its deep-breath pacing and undertow of unspecified malaise."

Updated through 9/2.

More from Cristina Nord in die taz (and in German). In short, she's enchanted.

Update: "The film is an unabashed homage to my parents and the places where I grew up. As a child, I spent hours and hours playing in hospitals and watching people. These are the places I love to go back to through cinema." Apichatpong Weerasethakul, as quoted by Paolo Menzione at Cineuropa.

Update, 9/2: For Daniel Kothenschulte, writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau (and in German), it's the best film of the fest so far.

Posted by dwhudson at September 1, 2006 12:37 AM