Two decades after his extensive and impactful work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chidgasornpongse presents his debut feature, 9 Temples to Heaven (9 วัด สู่สวรรค์). The film is a selection of the Quinzaine des Cineastes of the Cannes Film Festival.
The film follows a huge family of 9, who take their dying grandma to 9 different temples around Thailand to pray for her recovery. During this long journey, each of the family members must face the ideas of merit, faith, and religiosity in the clash of generations. Each of the temples presents a different dynamic to those individuals who must put their differences aside to heal the matriarch. In this sense, the film is a road movie of a big family that faces the differences of generations, relationships, and other aspects. Each of the temples has a different architecture, exposing the grandiosity of the physical venues that connect humans with the spiritual side. In this sense, there is a formulaic approach to each temple, presenting a new familiar drama, a clash between parents and children. In another sense, the materiality of each visit for each family member is a fascinating aspect, but the project suffers from the diminishing interest in each of the new spots.
At first, the director points out the differences between the grandiosity of the spiritual and the humane. The family embarks on a journey throughout the religious to save their loved one. Visually, the cameras by Jonathan Ricquebourg contrast the immensity of each temple with the worthless nature of the human being. Each new spot is an episode, an experience of their religiosity. It boosts the content of the debate by the drama between father and son, who does not believe in the merits as capable of saving his grandma’s life. There is a compelling debate about the religion as a forced practice by the family. As adults, you ought to fight that imposed nature and defend your own beliefs. Still, this fascinating debate buries itself under the film’s development, a slow-burning one that provides boredom in its extent, and not a riveting exercise on the formal structure and the discussion on faith.
It is inevitable to compare the pupil to the master, although Apichatpong Weerasethakul mastered his style in the form, underlying the themes to serve the esoteric nature of his artistry. Even in the slow-cinema territory, Weerasethakul expands most of the themes about Thailand within his films through an approach to the supernatural as a consequence of historical wounds. On the other hand, Chidgasornpongse proposes a lengthy journey through the senses as the primary focus, but each new turn becomes unclear, resulting in a tiring conclusion.
Despite an exciting exercise at first, the visual proposition in the film’s mid-section leans towards the scenarios and locations. The massive temples that fill the camera with their colors, and items that are a ritual to the Gods. The red of their costumes contrasts with the golden elements of the temples, a mix of the sacred and the human. Nonetheless, the bureaucratic visits occupy the more prominent part of the film, which benefits from the sequences in which the older child exits the venues to smoke. Similarly, it is an invitation for us to breathe as well, but it is a scarce movement amidst a film that swings on the slow-burning nature of the experience. In those scenes in the vans and cars, the audience ought to await the moments in which the director provides more profound substance in this lengthy and tiring trip.
Usually, we argue that the ending does not matter; the middle is the more vital aspect of a trip. However, Sompot Chidgasornpongse delivers a better ending than the center, creating the ambiance in a village that feels mysterious and esoteric, exactly like the spiritual elements of religion. Still, 9 Temples to Heaven, the long-awaited debut by the assistant director of one of the hottest names in the arthouse circuit, is an off-swing bet, which inflates the slow-burning structure of the film with sequences that lack visual and textual substance.
9 Temples to Heaven recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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