Here's a link to an interesting piece on the irrational censorship Apichatpong Weerasethakul's masterpiece SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY has suffered in Thailand:http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/2008/03/stranger-than-fiction.php. It baffles me that such a gentle, serene film would stir up such controversy - including accusations that it conveys a negative image of Thailand to foreigners and disgraces Apichatpong's parents -
or that any censorship board outside Iran would insist on a cut of a shot of doctors drinking whiskey. Weerasethakul's "solution" is ingenious, even if it will make the film largely unwatchable.

What is obscene here is the actions of the censors. What foolishness.

I've been following this ridiculous story off and on; thanks for the update, Steve. This movie (and Apichatpong's previous, TROPICAL MALADY) would unquestionably make my Best of the Decade list, if I was in the habit of producing such lists. But even if it were a piece of garbage, this would be an outrageous situation.

I saw the director speak at Anthology Film Archives in New York City a couple months ago, during a partial retro of his work, and he spoke a fair amount about this situation, in response to an audience question. He seemed to perceive the central problem as the power, and the paranoid touchiness, of official Buddhist arbiters who have wide leeway in approving or disapproving portrayals of Buddism and Buddhist clerics in art and popular culture.

The question, from a young American man, was almost as intriguing as his answer, actually. The questioner spoke about his time in Thailand, where he was working with a group of Buddhist monks on, I believe, a social justice project of some kind. He said he had generally perceived them as enlightened and progressive people, but suddenly one day the subject of SYNDROMES came up, and he found out they were actively involved in the movement against the film and its maker. They told him that Apichatpong is "a threat to Thai culture," but wouldn't even explain why because, as a foreigner, the young man supposedly wouldn't understand.

I'm sure some people, especially those monks, would tell me I'm being a Yankee cultural imperialist, trying to impose my Western standards on a situation I don't understand. As if Thai culture is some single, monolithic entity, and these censors are uniquely entitled to speak for it. From what I've seen of Thai movies, I seriously doubt the average local moviegoer would bat an eyelash at a monk strumming a guitar or a doctor having a sip of whiskey (even out of a bottle hidden in her artificial leg - I love this movie). This seems to have started out as yet another case of members of a small, elite group trying to protect their own prestige, self-image and power through (a:) arbitrarily throwing around their disproportionate weight, and (b:) blithely conflating their privilege with the well-being and moral standing of the society as a whole.

The linked report makes it sound like there's been another layer added on since, of punishment for an annoyingly recalcitrant artist who wouldn't simply knuckle under earlier in the controversy. Particularly, the obvious relish with which the officials went out of their way to insult the movie and its makers in their verdict makes me suspect that.

Funny about Apichatpong's solution: it kind of takes him back, unintentionally, to the more formalist avant-garde approach of his early shorts, some of which I saw at Anthology.