Blue

 Blue, premiered in 2018, is a short film, about 12 minutes long, directed by the celebrated Thai film maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  The movies seems to have been produced under the creative auspices of the Paris Opera, possibly a part of a short film festival that the cultural institution sponsors,  Blue is interesting, but too obscure, perhaps, to be compelling.  In a green-blue forest, possibly a jungle, a woman reclines under a cover on a pale bed.  The woman can't sleep.  Reviews of the film describe her as insomniac, although this is projecting more information into the movie than it actually exhibits.  From time to time, the woman opens her eyes or rolls over under her covers.  Somewhere proximate to the woman, in an imaginary space, it seems, there are some colorful theatrical backdrops.  These stylized paintings show landscapes --  in one of them, a yellow-brick path leads along an inlet between hoary-looking mountains, improbably rugged after the model of Chinese calligraphy.  The sun is setting over the sea.  Another back-drop shows a similarly yellowish path directed toward an ornate shrine in the center of the landscape.  Both images are obviously the product of the same faux-naif artist, and pictures are mounted on some sort of  canvas that can be ratcheted-up and down, a process that involves a loud clicking sound that is the most charming thing in the movie.  A couple of bright sparks show on the woman's blanket and these grow to become a large fiery blaze.  In a couple of shots, the blaze seems to be burning on the canvas flats as well.  The blaze burns without consuming anything and produces neither ash nor soot nor smoke -- the effect seems to be achieved by some kind of "front projection", that is, showing the fire reflected on a transparent plane immediately in front of the lens.  The fire gets bigger and the sizzle of flames becomes louder than the ambient jungle insect noises.  The fire continues for about eight minutes without the woman seeming aware of it -- then, the film ends.

The bed, the sleeping woman, and the operatic-looking scenery on the canvas screens comprise a triad that suggests something about how each of us creates our own imaginary world around us while we dream (or when we create art).  But the fire is hard to interpret because the woman doesn't seem aware that her bed is burning.  And I don't know what the title "Blue" means.  Probably, the film is best understood as a collage between three elements, all of which are independent of one another except in the mind of the film-maker:  there is fire superimposed on images, but not really burning anywhere except pictorially; we see a sleeper incongruously resting on a bed in the open jungle (probably representing the untamed aspects of the imagination); and there are artifacts that suggest culture, even high operatic culture, in the backdrops that are ratcheted up and down in the film and that seem to occupy yet another plane of existence.  The elements that intersect in the film,  probably, signify a collective "imaginary" -- that is, a map of an imaginary world.  But this is all speculation and surmise.