Fever Room

The caress of a soft female voice delivers us into an old-fashioned hospital room in the tropics, a well-worn white cube defined only by its out-looking windows. Like the delicate lapping of waves, soft countryside sounds and her gentle narration start us on a journey into an intricate weave of time and fantasy. With Weerasethakul’s characteristic somnambulic rhythm, wandering through her favourite places and flashes of her town, we are guided through fragments of the speaker’s memory, returning only to the hospital as a home. Home, Fever Room, where the mind drifts between the window-framed sky and thoughts of being under the ground. Suspended between quiet walls, its residents are protected from both the romance and the violence of the outside world, and life and death take time to speak to one another.

Following fragmented journeys we travel across lands and waters, witnessing flickers of relationship and conversation, looks and voices. Amongst these prolonged moments of emotion and landscape is a poignant reminder of the social context – a statue of Sarit Thanarat, one of the most repressive despots to rule Thailand under martial law – appearing next to a figure of Quan Yin. In this brief but powerful reference to Thailand’s military regime we observe the filmmaker’s consistent dedication to illuminating his nation’s predicament and anguish. The only shelter from such unsettling concern is the White Room to which we return – this waiting-room between Sky and Earth, where the heart can open to times past and future, with no need to engage in the race of the present. Are we seeing through the eyes of a young Weerasethakul, looking out at the world from his parents’ hospital workplace, contemplating the matters of the greater world?

The film trails off into darkness, and we are left hanging, suspended in a pregnant silence. As time slowly allows our eyes to adjust, we find ourselves in an obscure landscape – a newly-opened space beyond the screen, merging the cinematic world with a deep expanse of fog and rain. The seamless transition into this unnamed dream world feels like some sort of supernatural transportation. As we are gradually enveloped by a mesmerising journey of light and sound, in a world between sleep and waking, we are suspended in a space between consciousnesses where only other people’s shadows flicker in the distant mist. The light show takes us on a dramatic cruise, and one feels as though one has discovered the sensation of flying, both in the abstract mist and deep within our own selves. We embark on a fantasmal journey through a kind of fog vacuum inhaling us deeper and deeper into a childlike state and a metaphysical realm. As we soar lone and free through layers of cloud and deep sea, we sink into a richly internal space, dissolving the skins that separate.

And so we return, to find ourselves sitting on the floor of the theatre – in fact, sitting on the floor of the theatre stage – conversing with the damp smell of rain and the churning fog, hypnotised by this world of sound and light. One is left brimming with a peculiar sense of empowered aloneness, a knowledge of deep connection and utter smallness. Expanding the vocabularies both of cinema and theatre, with a calm freedom Weerasethakul literally breaks open cinema and its perceived limitations and allows the spectator to journey his own imagination, nourished by the filmmaker’s fine-tuned creation. With characteristic grace he returns us to a primitive sensibility. As we enjoy the pleasure of slowness within our times of shallow immediacy, the sanctuary of the theatre provides a rehabilitation of the senses. One is left with a profound sense of relief as the voyage brings us to a deeper dimension in which we can exist. A work that defies definition or category, Fever Room places its emphasis on fragrances and nuances that seep into our cells, touching on our natural understanding and yearning for non-linear expression, as the dimensions of time and space stretch, bend and fragment in irregular, organic shapes. Immersed in the echoes of murmured tales and the dancing shadows of Plato’s cavemen, we are gently reminded of the crevices between the realities in which we exist. An experimental masterpiece and a testament to the grace and sapience of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Angela Reynolds (SCAI the Bathhouse)

ACC Theater Opening Festival 2015