36
(2012)
Oom and location scout Sai (Vajrasthira Koramit) spend some time hanging
out together at a series of potential sets for a film. Sai takes a
large number of (mostly) work-related photos with her digicam, while
Oom, who does not like to be photographed himself, snaps the odd shot
with an old-fashioned analogue camera for his private collection.
Director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s feature debut, 36,
borrows its title and structure from the number of exposures in a
conventional full-length film roll for a camera like Oom’s — even if,
paradoxically, 36 has been shot digitally. The film’s first 11 takes,
each coming with its own heading like a photograph in an album, document
Oom’s and Sai’s developing relationship. The remaining 25 follow Sai two years after she has parted company with Oom.
Asked to find a suitable location to match her director’s
boyhood memories of a now demolished clinic, Sai discovers that her
digital files from 2008 have been corrupted, and that she has lost all
her photographs from that period, whether of buildings or of Oom.
The "problem with time" that Oom foresees is in fact the key theme of
36. Here everything is ephemeral, the future is always different from
the past, and even the medium itself, whether film or digital, is an
unstable and inexact haunt for human longings. And at a mere 68 minutes, 36 discontinuous scenes
of change in a woman’s life are, for all their elliptical brevity,
carefully paced to carry the full weight of time’s passing. The results
are a whimsical yet wise catalogue of once lived-in rooms onto
which Thamrongrattanarit invites us to project our own sense of
nostalgia.
