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Dance with My Father : Eternity
  By Sorradithep Supachanya / 7 September 2011
 

 

 

Sivaroj Kongsakul’s award-winning feature-film debut, Eternity (Tee-Rak), starts and ends on a solemn note. Life is fragile and fleeting, and all relationships come to painful endings. But the film’s middle part—an intimate, heartfelt romance between two young adults—shows that only love makes life worthwhile and it is this promise and commitment of a lifelong love that gives the living the strength to carry on when their loved ones depart.

Winner of the top prize at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Eternity finally opens in Thailand, albeit in limited release. Co-produced by Aditya Assarat, whose Wonderful Town also won Rotterdam in 2008, the film clearly exhibits his strong influence of an evenly paced and powerfully themed narration, which proves most emotionally rewarding for the patient viewers.

The film’s opening 20 minutes run without dialogues, but only with a man aimlessly driving his motorcycle through a deserted rural village and exploring an abandoned house. It soon becomes apparent that the man is a spirit revisiting places in his former life. At a nearby pond, the present impeccably transitions into the past, recounting the courtship with his future wife.

Thereafter, the film embarks on a sweet, poignant episode of how their romance blooms: their hesitant display of affection in public, their hand holding at night, their teasing by the pond, and their first kiss. But as reality would have it, the honeymoon period comes to an abrupt end and the film gives us the woman, now widowed with children, in the painful process of learning to continue living, as we all must do at some point in our lives, sooner or later.

Interestingly, almost throughout the film’s entire runtime, the protagonists turn their backs to the camera as if to simulate images we typically see in our dreams, symbolizing how transient life can be. The few moments that they face the audience are when they discuss about death and dying. With non-professional actors in the lead characters, this presents a hidden advantage.

 

 

Dialogues linger on mundane subjects: geckos, fishes in the pond, insomnia, local folklore, and so on, which make the film too “light” for its theme about death. Moreover, while the story reveals that the man’s occupation is a life insurance salesman, it does not make the connection to film’s theme.

As with life, Eternity progresses linearly and does not climax. While writer-director Sivaroj reveals he made the film about his parents, in fact he could have made the film about all of us who are, will be, or have ever been in love. Poetic and meditative, Eternity serves as a cordial tribute to the dead and a reaffirming prayer for the living.

   

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