Mekong Hotel

Mekong Hotel is an  hour-long film by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul pendant to his longer feature, Cemetery of Splendor (2015).  Even when designed as conventional narratives, the Thai director's films present significant challenges to his audience -- the movies, often, feature utterly bizarre, supernatural events rooted in Thailand's folk Buddhism and are shot in a serene contemplative style that, in some moods of mindfulness, encourages meditation and, in other moods, drowsiness.  (I have never watched one of Weerasethakul's films without falling asleep -- and I count myself a fan of the film maker's works.)  Mekong Hotel does not present anything like a conventional narrative and its subject matter is very, very strange:  at a huge, deserted hotel overlooking the Mekong River, Weerasethakul and a friend with a guitar are designing a sound-track, apparently, the sound track to Mekong Hotel.  The man with the guitar begins playing, apparently improvising -- sometimes, he plays what sound like very slow and beautiful blues; other times, he gets lost and has to stop and re-start the music and, for part of the movie, he seems just to be casually strumming his instrument.  Nonetheless, the guitar music in its various, improvised modes underlies the entire film and gives it a relaxed, laid-back and contemplative mood.  Hungry ghosts called Pobs live in the hotel and are sometimes seen feasting on entrails -- the guts are from eviscerated pets and, sometimes, people.  Jenjira Pongpas, the heroine of Cemetery of Splendor, is on hand and, on occasion references events in the other film -- for instance, she mentions her American husband, Frank, a man we met in the Cemetery of Splendor.  Lying listlessly on a bed, Jenjira confesses that she is a 600 year old vampire; this doesn't seem to much impress her teenage daughter.  Sitting on a balcony over the river, Jenjira recalls being taught how to fire an M16 rifle during the troubles at the time of the war in Vietnam.  From the balconies of the hotel, we sometimes see enigmatic events:  a big backhoe digs in the river embankment and a strange white column falls over; two workers seem to be sweeping up a parking lot near the hotel.  We learn that there is a huge flood underway and that Bangkok may be underwater -- the government is subsidizing boats for the catastrophe.  One man has a machine that he wears on his head that projects him outside of his body -- the machine looks like a backpack.  Another man kneels on the balcony eating offal while a woman who seems to represent the evil spirit within him berates him -- the man knows about his future lives:  he will be reborn as a horse, as several varieties of insect, and, then, as a Filipino boy.  Jenjira talks about Laotian refugees and how the government subsidized them to the extent that she wished that she was one of their number.  The film's final shot, lasting at least six minutes, is an image of the Mekong River at sunset -- a tree floats down the river toward where one, then, two, then four people on jet skis are aimlessly looping around and around on the vast, gradually darkening expanse of water.  The fallen tree drifts out of sight and the four people on jet skis skitter over the surface of the huge river like waterbugs until the film ends.

It's unclear what this film means.  I assume that it must be read as an appendix or foreword, perhaps, to Cemetery of Splendor.  That film involves the effects of historical trauma on the present and explores the idea that past calamities can rule us, as it were, from their graves.  Mekong Hotel seems to be about something similar.  Here the previous trauma is specified as anxiety arising from an influx of Laotian refugees into Thailand in the wake of the Vietnam conflict and militarization of the Thai population near the border.  In Buddhist thought, bad actions result in karmic consequences, including unfavorable rebirths -- this seems to be one of the themes in Mekong Hotel.  I think the film riffs on the idea of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, a place also haunted by ghosts trapped in the past.  Thai dissension is visualized in this film as a kind of cannibalism.  The violent past is a vampire on the present.  But the film, despite its horror movie aspects, is profoundly calm, serene, and contemplative -- the ghosts and vampires are viewed with great tenderness as the victims of historical trauma.  The vast Mekong river rolls calmly toward the horizon, uprooting everything including huge trees -- human beings play on the surface of this immense forceful being, but can't affect its flow.  History rolls past us and we are like tiny waterbugs cutting inconsequential wakes into the surface of the vast and irresistible current of time and existence.