Tiger director Anocha Suwichakornpong tells Edward Lawrenson about how her debut film Mundane History went from conventional narrative to experimental lyricism
Mundane History, the title of Anocha Suwichakornpong's debut feature, provides a flavour of its distinctive qualities. “I liked the strong contrast between the two words,” the Thai filmmaker tells the Daily Tiger. “Mundane suggests everyday life, whereas history is something far grander.”
There's plenty of quotidian detail in the film's main focus: the relationship between a middle-class young man, Ake, paralysed after an unspecified accident, and Pun, the carer who looks after him. Embittered by his disability, Ake is withdrawn and rarely leaves his room; a state of physical and emotional stasis that Suwichakornpong evokes through an editing approach that is based more on cyclical rhythms than a linear narrative.
“Ake stays in bed most of the time,” she explains, “things revolve around him, life is very repetitive. When I started the screenplay it was a lot more conventional; I spelled things out. But when I was editing, I started to notice repeated patterns, even in the shots themselves, so my editor and I decided to explore that aspect (which was already inherent in the story).”
This editing process took six months and marked another close collaboration between Suwichakornpong and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's regular editor, Lee Chatametikool, after working on her short. “It's a good working relationship,” says Suwichakornpong. “It's very strange. During editing, we spend a lot of time not editing; we spend a lot of time talking. Every time I turn up at his office, we spend half and hour talking politics and things.” They also listen to music to “calm our nerves and also to find some structure for the film.”
It was during the edit that Suwichakornpong first heard the track by the Malaysian band Furniture that plays over one of the film's most memorable screens: a gorgeous, slightly trippy CGI sequence of the creation of a supernova, which Ake and Pun view during their visit to a planetarium.
This is one of a number of lyrical and experimental sequences that evoke the gradual reawakening of Ake's internal life, and suggestively point to the film's larger concerns – and the sense of grandness and transcendence hinted at in the second half of the movie's title.
Talking about the changes that the project underwent, from a more conventional, character-based screenplay to the allusive and enigmatic final film, Suwichakornpong is keen to acknowledge the support of the Hubert Bals fund: “Two years ago I got some money for project development for this film: at the time it was called The Sparrow”, she says. “We shot the film, then we still needed money for post production – we had a CGI sequence; it was quite inexpensive, but we still needed completion funds.”
More about Mundane History.