At times, during their conversations on the balcony of the titular Mekong Hotel, characters seem to be filmed with their backs turned away from the camera; their faces turned towards the river, facing the thither island, and the horizon set at the center of the frame. Even when they’re facing the camera, the natural, backlit light casts shadows that make their faces a little more indecipherable. The dispositivism of the world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (we’ll call him Joe from now on) is very apparent here: everything is observed through a static, pensive wide shot, which I’ve seen people describe as having an accruing hypnotic effect. This being only my second feature I’ve seen from Joe, with the first being Cemetery of Splendour, I find his apparatus introduces a kind of liminal gentleness rather than an overarching hypnoticism.
At Mekong Hotel, Joe’s system of static shots welcomes layers of ghosts, dreams, and fourth-wall breaks. Because they are all shot in the same manner, the legibility of one reality transitioning to another becomes very tricky; it’s only until a few seconds into a shot that one would realize we’ve entered a different reality. The lodge where everything unfolds overlooks the Mekong River, which borders Laos. The intangibility of identity runs throughout the films. Are the people onscreen actors, real people, or ghosts? One time, the ghost mother figure, played by Jenjira, remembers being upset that a number of people from Laos were migrating into her hometown.
In the beginning, Joe himself is seen sitting next to a man playing his guitar, and this music carries over into the rest of the film and is often overlaid on natural dialogue. Is it diegetic or not? Does all the music we hear in film stem from an alternative reality? The mixture of the music with the other sounds is quite troubling to me. It reminds me of Albert Serra’s Story of My Death, where the mixing signals a direct intrusion that completely neglects any form of cohesion. When the scene is quiet, the guitar strings create a peaceful atmosphere, but when there is dialogue, the strings clash with the words. Add this to scenes where certain words in conversations get completely muted; what remains is neither the music nor the conversation, but a blatant, simplistic formal exercise. Joe’s cinema so far seems to me an exercise in quietude, which to me carries some interest but also feels quite limited, especially in Mekong Hotel. At the end of the day, watching boats pass the Mekong River, leaving ripples behind them during magic hour, is nice, but it cannot account for all the wonders that the cinematic eye is capable of recording.
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