As a list junkie, I'm still having a great time combing over the lists of the best films of the decade. In particular, I'm enthralled by the polls conducted at Indiewire and Film Comment (neither of which I participated in). The polls agreed on seven of the top ten films, and they ranged from well-known films to a couple of titles that feel pretty obscure. One film that reached the top ten on both lists barely ever had any distribution or attention in the United States. It showed up in the spring of 2007 on no more than 2 screens at a time, and its total U.S. gross was about $16,000 (that's sixteen thousand, not million). I saw it on a DVD screener at my house, and to the best of my knowledge, it never opened for a regular run in my hometown. The film is Syndromes and a Century, from Thailand, written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He studied for a time in Chicago, so if you can't pronounce his name, he doesn't mind being called "Joe."

This was Weerasethakul's fourth feature film, although he has also made several shorts and documentaries and collaborated on a feature-length musical comedy called The Adventures of Iron Pussy (which, frankly, doesn't count). All four of his films placed on the Film Comment poll, and the latter three placed on the IndieWire poll (and all four are available on DVD). They all play deliberately with narrative and time structure, and even the structure of logic. In his extraordinary first film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), he tells the story of a schoolteacher, a student and a boy with magical powers, but he does it in a most unusual way. He takes a camera loaded with black-and-white film all over the Thai countryside and invites the people he meets to contribute to the story. The story takes all kinds of wild turns, and meanwhile Weerasethakul very often takes time out to enjoy the sights; it's relaxing and enthralling at the same time, and seems to me to be a new kind of cinema, embracing and celebrating both fiction and non-fiction simultaneously.

His next film, Blissfully Yours (2002) began a trend of splitting his films into two distinct halves. The first half usually plays like any ordinary movie, but the second half then twists around and subverts everything you saw before. In Blissfully Yours, Weerasethakul even runs the opening credits (!) at this halfway point. The third film, Tropical Malady (2005) -- which also made the Film Comment top ten -- depicts a tender, gay romance between a solider and a simple country boy. Then the soldier enters the jungle and the movie turns into a fantasy about trying to capture a tiger spirit, although the two stories parallel one another quite clearly.

Finally we come to the fourth film, Syndromes and a Century, which appears to be Weerasethakul's most personal work and perhaps his most emotionally affecting. It's ostensibly the story of how his parents met while working in a hospital. The two halves are dedicated to each parent, as each remembers events slightly differently. Some scenes echo one another with different outcomes, and sometimes completely different events occur. Once again, it's a film of emotional impressions rather than narrative flow, although, to be honest, I find this to be Weerasethakul's most complex film -- especially since the break between the two halves is not always clear -- and it requires more than one viewing. Plus, I would recommend working your way through Weerasethakul's filmography in chronological order first, to get an idea of his personal evolution. But it's easy to become a fan, and since Syndromes and a Century has very obviously secured itself a place in the cinema canon, it's definitely worth the effort.