Mundane History

Synopsis: Ake is young man who has been paralyzed from the waist down after an accident. A male nurse, Pun, is hired to care for him. Initially hostile towards each other this is the story of how their friendship develops.

At the beginning of Mundane History we see a young man lying in bed. The music gradually builds into a surge of distorted rock guitar before settling in to describing the mundane existence of the bed-ridden Ake and his nurse, Pun. Ake is the son of a well-to-do family who is embittered by the blow of fate that has robbed him of his youth. Pun is a young man of humble means who has taken the job of Ake’s nurse out of financial necessity and though diligent in his duty feels little empathy for his surroundings which he describes as “soulless”. The film follows the thawing relationship of these two young men whilst, following an achronological timeline. gradually piecing together Ake’s back story. This is done with low key application that follows the confined pattern of Ake’s daily routine with many soundless passages of inactivity.

The director has said that one thing the film comments on is Thailand's treatment of disabled people but for an English language this might be less than apparent (there are no doubt other aspects on both a personal and, particularly in the film’s latter stages, a political plane, that will be lost on the non-Thai viewer). Mundane History seems to be exactly what the title suggests – an unremarkable depiction of the everyday. Then the film radically shifts gear, and we are thrust into a “cosmological” sequence, 2001-like journeying to the stars to the accompaniment of fuzzed-up electronic music. This passage is relatively brief but it is marvellously effective in setting the mundanity of the story in a much “bigger picture” (entirely coincidentally it would seem, Terrence Malick uses a similar device in his currently screening The Tree Of Life), tearing the viewer out of their sense of boredom to an awareness of the protean dimensions of time and space. Then we fall back to earth. At least for a while, for the at the film’s end Anocha again shifts gear, this time with an extraordinarily depiction of a baby being delivered by caesarean section. The poor little tyke is inconsolable at the disturbance and, as the saying goes, bawls its lungs out. It is an extraordinary moment that Anocha simply lets play out.

“As in Heaven, so on earth” one might say: birth and death, endless becoming, pain and suffering, such are the constants of life in all its forms. Whilst some might say that this awareness is implicit in all tragedy and that Anocha has been unnecessarily literal with her symbology, particularly with the “new born” sequence, which after all is not an uncommon device, the balance of the mundane and the extraordinary or the extraordinary in the mundane is potently realized. That this is a debut feature makes Mundane History doubly impressive.

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