Come Here (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2021) (Patreon)

For awhile now, I've needed to go back and rewatch Anocha's 2016 film By the Time It Gets Dark, a film I did not much care for at the time. It's one of those instances in which a film has a very particular wavelength that I suspect I just couldn't align with. I found it desultory and ill-shaped, but that may have actually been the point. In any case, Anocha's latest film is far more coherent, even as it makes a number of unexpected dips into the surreal. However I think maybe the fact that Come Here is a medium-length featurette works in its favor, since it becomes much easier for a viewer to suss out Anocha's oblique connections despite the surface-level discontinuity.

Put another way, Come Here is a cinematic tone poem, A trip to the western Thai province of Kanchanaburi provides a specific locale that asserts itself as a kind of force, both allowing for certain kinds of events to happen while precluding others. The film begins on a train, with the camera trained on the window and the landscape rushing by, frequently dissolving into abstraction. As we learn later in the film, Kanchanaburi is home to an abandoned railway bed, the remnants of a train service between Thailand and Myanmar. The emptiness where the train once was largely defines the landscape, as if the town were haunted by the missing train.

If we compare this idea to certain Apichatpong films, in which the jungle is psychologically charged by the unseen presence of some mythological monster or ghosts from the past, we can see that Anocha is working at something of a right-angle to those ideas. What is gone is progress and technology, and its former space is being reclaimed by nature. This porosity between human and natural endeavor is echoed in Come Here's repeated discussion of the closure of the Dusit Zoo, a place where human beings force their will on animals, not exactly domesticating them but depositing them for inspection. 

The main cast of Come Here consists of three young men and a young woman, and the melange of natural and supernatural forces impinge on them in different ways. While Saiparn Aapinya Sakuljaroensuk), the woman, exhibits signs of bodily distress that eventually give way to a physical transformation, the three men (Waywiree Ittianunkul, Sornrapat Patharakorn, Bhumibhat Thavornsiri) start play-acting as animal, their performance becoming more and more intense until two of the men are engaged in a cockfight.

Anocha may be stipulating that spaces have their own desires, and they can impose their needs upon the beings who populate them. But she's also considering the role of performance as a fundamental part of the human condition. We learn that the foursome are part of an experimental acting troupe, and we see them striking a set whose purpose is revealed only later. The retreat to the country, which suggests a loosening of affect and a clearing for greater honesty, is re-staged as a theatrical presentation. This of course undermines any assumptions we may have made regarding the first part of the film, and as you can see in the still above, Anocha wants to show us that spaces we tend to consider quite separate (country/city, interior/exterior, landscape/mindscape) are always adjacent to one another, if not interpenetrating entirely. Like the animals from the defunct zoo, Anocha's actors are circumscribed and displayed for a cultural purpose. But there are some aspects of life than cannot be so easily contained.