Very quickly, we feel that the filmmaker’s ambitions are stepping on each other, to the point that several ideas for separate films seem to have been patched together – should we exclude him? After a suspenseful incipit in the jungle, under the grapeshot of an army in hiding, the story engages in a sentimental drama, crossed from time to time by echoes of the military situation in northern Thailand in the 1960s. Young officers then seek to overthrow the dictatorship in place, the atmosphere is that of a powder keg, but the story provides a bubble of indolence out of time. The daughter of a watchmaker, courted by two suitors, sees the more humble and charming of the two put out of the running by the unscrupulous lieutenant who ends up getting her hand.
Connected to the rustling silence of nature, multiplying temporal leaps, Anatomy of Time wants to circulate capital themes (life, death, the inexorable race of time, the historical wound of a country), but struggles to convince as it seems to resort to codes, such as the heavy allegory of the clock. The rest elliptically narrates the social disgrace and physical degeneration of the elderly soldier, who has become impotent, to whom his wife devotes all her care.
Behind such a film, between prosaic bodies and mental spirals, one suspects that there was the mad hope of holding a new Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The peace of a hospital room where the bedridden seems plunged into a coma, the staging in slow motion and its sensory stimuli resonate too much with the cinema of the master not to find the thick line. Because the feeling of general unity is absent, the fragmentation of the story gives less the impression of deliciously losing the north than of struggling with frustration.