Using the calmly microcosmic setting of hospitals (country and urban), personal inspiration from the lives of his mother and father, and of the motif, meandering from the foreground to the background, of healthiness (of body, spirit, and environment), Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates a serene and mysterious film of humble romances, human connections, memories and relativity in Syndromes and a Century. Like Tropical Malady before it, Weerasethakul bifurcates his film into two halves; but this time the split is not so much into two different modes of storytelling as it is the use of a more subtle form of repetition and variations of obliquely similar stories told in different settings and focusing on the respective pasts of the director’s mother and that of his father.

The first half of Syndromes and a Century is set in a country hospital and focuses on a female doctor there, Dr. Toey, (Nantarat Sawaddikul), who is casually pursued by another doctor in the ward. After an abrupt proposal from the young man she diverts his romantic attentions by telling him the story of her own romantic meeting with an orchid hunter. Weerasethakul, who has a playful style of unexpected digressions and sidetracks in both style and narrative, dramatizes the doctor’s story in an elliptical manner, visualizing her meeting of the man at a nursery, the acquisition of a rare orchid, and a later picnic to the countryside with his aunt. Both Dr. Toey’s talk with the courting doctor and her story of the romance are concluded ambiguously, as she relates how the botanist confesses his love for her by telling her that he is secretly in love with a woman and does not know how to reveal it. Meanwhile, the hospital dentist (Arkanae Cherkam), who sings Thai country music as a hobby, bonds with a young monk who wanted to be a DJ. After a hospital-run festival for a Buddhist holiday, the dentist confesses that he sees his dead brother reincarnated in the monk, and one senses a strange attraction or affection between the two. The monk denies the reincarnation (in a way, perhaps, related to his denial of his music ambitions—both the connection to the doctor and the hobby being inappropriate for his position), and this section of the film likewise concludes without closure, the dentist pursuing, but then losing, the monk. The second half of the film starts up without concluding either the friendship of the dentist and monk or closing the romantic relations of the female doctor. Instead, the setting is moved to a more modernized hospital in Bangkok, and the second half starts just as the first half did, with Dr. Toey interviewing a just-hired hospital employee, Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram), with the same love struck staff member waiting aside to talk to her. But this time the story follows Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram). He makes his first exploratory rounds in the hospital, meets two female doctors and talks about his hometown, casually interviews a youth who has been poisoned and watches a female doctor try to cure him with chakra, and eventually meets his girlfriend Joy, whose company is sending her to a newly industrialized district and wants him to move out there with her.

One of the unexpected—and most welcome—things about Syndromes and a Century and Weerasethakul’s films in general is that while maintaining a familial resemblance to the monumental master-shot style made famous by Hou Hsiou-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Weerasethakul’s work carries a serene air of gentleness, off-handedness, openness, and a complete lack of pretension—traits that strongly humanize and personalize his work. However puzzling and mysterious Syndromes and a Century may be, the filmmaker never allows the opaqueness of his film to burden the viewer with the task of strict, literal decipherment. These successes are rooted in Weerasethakul’s casually realist aesthetic, his unexpected humor, and in his equally casual experimental digressions. These tendencies make his movies feel very spontaneous and unpredictable, if not simply free-flowing—qualities in delightful opposition to the usual plodding solemnity that such a structural and highly formal style usually preclude. In the first half, the film will listen in on Dr. Toey prescribing something for the dreams of a monk, but then cut away to give a moment to a secondary character, and only minutes later the doctor is recalling her romantic story, which will bloom out of the film—never feeling like a flashback but rather feeling like one of many options the film can move to at any given time, a tender way of looking at both memory (or perhaps recollection) and storytelling cinematically. A prime example of this quality is within Dr. Toey’s story, where, while considering her feelings for her orchid seller while on a picnic, she hears about the folkloric background of a nearby field. One expects the film to move again towards a visualization of this tale, but instead Weerasethakul settles for a variety of character-less shots of the field and forest area. But then suddenly there is a cut to an event from the parable, a beautiful eclipse, but the odd and supple shot of the darkened sun does not seem to exist either inside Dr. Toey’s story of her picnic, nor in the fable itself. The second half of the film likewise has such deviations, but in that case they tend more towards documentary-like camera movements, moving around the city hospital, its modern rooms, and the statues on the grounds outside of it, somewhat reminiscent of the documentary technique of Michelangelo Antonioni.

While Syndromes and a Century is purposefully unschematic in its dual stories, the country/city dichotomy is split by a style that changes in the second half, where the camera is loosened up to track around (often autonomous of characters), dolly in and out, pan 360 degrees, and even free itself in a handheld shot following Dr. Nohng making his first rounds in the hospital. This is an inquisitive look at the dynamism of the city hospital, and not necessarily a critical one, the latter quality being one that could easily be diagnosed in the film’s contrast of country and city locations. Whereas Weerasethakul’s camera basks in most of the stable set-ups in the country (and, for example, emphasizes natural lighting in its interiors), in the city there is a curiosity about the urban progress (emphasizing artificial light, especially in the city version of the dentist’s room, which is cold and hyper-clinical). The actual function and abilities of the doctors does not seem to change with the setting; rather, the move to the city simply makes more public the idea—more subtly expressed in the country—of healthiness of spirit, body, and ultimately, life. This publicness of healthiness is seen both in the statutes of Thai progressives around the hospital, and in public exercise, like aerobics and jogging, done around the city. Inside these contexts are the stories of the characters—Dr. Toey’s oblique memory of a romance and the dentists’ hopeful and ambiguous relationship with the monk in the country, and Dr. Nohng’s low-key passivity in the city, wary of moving with his girlfriend and curious about a patient that neither medicine nor spiritual remedies can cure. If the first half seems more nostalgically pensive, focused on personal stories, and evokes more of a sense of memory than in the second half, these feelings are replaces by a curiosity for the progress emblematized in the modern setting, of the space these doctors and their patients inhabit, and of the understated ways this different setting expresses itself in relationships around the hospital.

In Weerasethakul’s unpresuming style there seems less an overarching point to the connections and repetitions between these characters and their settings as there is a series of momentary quotidian observations—paradoxically considered at a substantial, contemplative length and with a playful and inquisitive attitude—about human interaction in a place built ostensibly for the betterment of fellow human beings. These mild and mysterious rhymes in the film are, refreshingly, less overtly structural than they are almost philosophically presumed—such similarities are just a part of the way life works. Thus the motif, introduced by the monks in the film, of the notions of karma and reincarnation, which suggest a kind of continuation and connection. But, as in the monk’s denial of the dentist’s assertion about his brother, and, more obliquely still, as in the unresolved romantic situation of Dr. Toey, these follow-throughs and connections between people and places sometimes are only half-formed, or, more hopefully, still in the making.