The strangest film I've seen in some time is an experimental docu-drama from Thailand called Mysterious Object at Noon, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai architect who has an MFA in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (which, when you think about it, is a great town for an architect to go to in order to study film). It's not a docu-drama in the American sense of the word, but rather a film that documents a narrative, the tale of a home study teacher and her disabled student. How it does this is what is so unusual. Working for over three years with an all-volunteer cast & crew – which also means an ever-changing cast & crew – Weerasethakul employed the surrealist game of the Exquisite Corpse, which, as described by one web site devoted to this practice,

was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.

Now imagine playing this same game with film, not only with the urban elites of Bangkok, but with villagers in Weerasethakul's native north who have only limited experience with cinema and no real concept of fiction. The results are both primitive and startling. Filmed in black & white with the cheapest imaginable equipment and film stock, Mysterious Object is something akin to a surrealist version of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera set in the Thailand of the 1990s, which means everything from contemporary skyscrapers and freeway on-ramps to elephants wandering into the scene as some boys who've been playing a version of hacky sack try to improvise what might come next. One group of villagers act out their section, which includes music (some of it involving a mouth organ unlike anything I've ever seen before). Another woman, early on, simply tells her own story, which involves being sold by her father in return for bus fare. There is a long truck ride through Bangkok at the beginning that feels like an homage both to Vertov and to Tarkovsky's Solaris until the driver and his partner start trying to sell tuna. During the course of the film, the teacher gives birth – tho that verb phrase doesn't really do justice to what actually happens – to a young man who zips her unconscious body into a closet and ransacks the student's home, World War 2 comes to a conclusion, the populace is admonished to buy American products, aliens invade, and the teacher gets a rash. The young boy is both much loved and abandoned by his parents. At one point, the boy to whom the teacher gives birth turns into a murderous giant. The one element that Weerasethakul uses to keep his various narrative threads from entirely spinning out of control is a small team of actors who periodically act out some of the threads narrated by different speakers.

This film works for many of the same reasons that any artwork that is actively trying to invent its own genre does – in this sense, Man with a Movie Camera, as well as books as diverse as Tristram Shandy, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Moby Dick, Spring & All and Visions of Cody, are almost parallel projects. Each questions everything and makes no assumptions as to how to proceed. In this context, even a wrong decision (presuming of course we could define such) would be a fresh one. At the same time, Weerasethakul clearly understands this role as historical – there is a scene in which the film-maker and his colleagues are walking along & one comments "We should have had a script." The film ends when & where it does because that's where, literally, the film stock Weerasethakul had at his disposal ran out.

If you don't care for experimental cinema, you can almost be certain that you're going to hate this film. Even if you love the work of Stan Brakhage, Warren Sonbert & Abigail Child, you may find it hard to imagine that something like this can still be produced in the 21st century. Would it still hold its fascination if the film were in English about Oakland? Frankly, it might not – Steve Benson, who first turned me on Mysterious Object, calls Tropical Malady, Weerasethakul's other film available through NetFlix, "catastrophically disappointing" tho it won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004. In any event, there is this film, which taken on its own is a dive into a culture – and into a perspective on cinema – that few of us will every have the opportunity to experience directly. As such, it's a trip you should probably take.

*Possible Spoilers*

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul crafted one of the more unique debut films to appear in quite a while with MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON, which generated a significant buzz on the global festival circuit and seems to mark the beginning of a very promising film career.

Weerasethakul's dreamy not-quite-drama, not-quite-documentary opens with a view down a freeway, taking in the skyline of Bangkok (in opening scenes that evoke the infamous 'freeway' scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS),before gliding down a highway exit into progressively smaller side streets, eventually ending up in a neighborhood and finding the first of his many subject/character/author/collaborators (nearly everyone appearing in the film is simultaneously all four). A woman relates a grim, true story and pauses before spinning off into another story, this one invented. Weerasethakul starts with the shard of a story invented here, and - using the Surrealist 'Exquisite Corpse' game/technique - asks everyone else he encounters to add to it - then editing the results (after three years of compiling footage) into MYSTERIOUS OBJECT.

With a story that is invented - as both an experiment in film, and a piece of collectively generated contemporary folklore - almost literally as you watch (excepting Weetasethakul's editing - the finished product was stitched together from 3+ hours of footage),this film shatters all kinds of boundaries - between experimental art and folklore, between fiction and documentary, between numerous stylistic genres, and between author/artist/creative mind and spectator/viewer/consumer. The individuals appearing in the film are non-actors; the story, which starts as a folkloric tale about a handicapped boy and his teacher, veers off into something resembling mythologic sci-fi. Throughout MYSTERIOUS OBJECT, bits of documentary footage suddenly give way to seamless reenactments of the story (as it is being told),often interspersed with 'found' bits of news footage or soap operas (which all seem to end up commenting on the narrative as it evolves); in one scene late in the film, the director and crew step into the film, revealing (in their workmanlike actions) some of the process behind it all, and incorporating that into the ever-evolving story as well.

The cinematography of MYSTERIOUS OBJECT reminded me somewhat of BREATHLESS - the stories are dissimilar, but the grainy, atmospheric black-and-white look is pleasantly similar, and they share an energetic willingness to tinker with notions of what films can or can't be. And - without resorting to exoticism, cuteness or pandering to any outside cultural expectations, a variable view of Thailand is offered, moving with ease across the varied religious, cultural and economic divides in Thai society. The consistently rich and affectionate glimpses of rural and urban landscapes and the diversity of the participants makes for compelling viewing - experimentalist or not, Weerasethakul gives everyone the opportunity to reveal his or her own personality during their shining moment on screen, creating a kaleidoscope of humor, quirkiness and/or mundane realism.

The end result is a surprising mix of the avant-garde and the affectionate, infused with both a great love of intrepid experimentalism and of Thai life and society at its' most everyday and average, and offering a great meditation on creativity as well in this remarkably crafted and most unusual film.

A camera attached to a moving car takes us down a busy city street in Thailand. Abruptly, the car turns into a narrow alley where we see brush grass and run down shacks. As the camera enters one of the houses, a heavy-set woman speaks of the trauma involved in her being sold into prostitution by her father. When she is finished, an off-camera voice asks her to tell another story, real or fiction. It is then that we begin to sense that cinematically we are in unchartered territory. Internationally acclaimed Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first feature Mysterious Object at Noon is an offbeat mixture of reality and fiction in which there is no screenplay or linear narrative, only a story created and added to by each participant in the mode of the French game "exquisite corpse".

The story the woman first tells is that of a teacher named Dogfahr whose young pupil is a cripple confined to a wheelchair. The tale is then dramatized on screen by non actors alternating with the talking storyteller. As the camera moves north and south of Bangkok into the Thai countryside, a cross section of Thai's continue the story by adding a few lines. These include two deaf girls using sign language, a song and dance troupe, and children in a rural Thai school. With each addition, the tale becomes vastly different and increasingly fantastic. The mysterious object in the title falls from the teacher who has collapsed and turns into an extraterrestrial boy with strange powers, a duplicate teacher, and finally a "witch tiger" and a magic sword.

Some sequences stand by themselves and are without any relation to the continuing storyline. The teacher brings her father to the doctor for a hearing test and complains of a strange line around her neck which the doctor dismisses as an allergy or the effect of wearing her necklace. Parents talk of a boy who escaped death in a plane crash because he was protected by amulets, and a scene shows women bargaining at a fish market. An experimental film with a small budget shot in 16-millimeter black and white, Mysterious Object at Noon glows with warmth and playfulness. As it progresses, it also slows down and becomes more of a meditation on Thai culture, creating a mood of tranquility and peace. Like Seinfeld, it is ostensibly "about nothing", but turns out to be about everything.