★★★★
A middle-aged Thai man drags his entire family on a single-day nine-temple merit-making pilgrimage after his boss has a vision that his mother may die, in Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s quietly funny, meditative, sometimes faltering fiction debut. It comes over like his mentor Apichatpong Weerasethakul meets Little Miss Sunshine – and if that sounds like your idea of bliss, you’ll be in heaven.
Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s fiction debut is aimed at a precise and possibly narrow audience: people who love durational slow cinema, and also love Little Miss Sunshine. If that is you, you will be in heaven. Chidgasornpongse spent over two decades as assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who produces here), working on films including Tropical Malady, Cemetery of Splendour and Memoria, and the influence is audible in the film’s rhythms: the long stillnesses, the quiet attention to spiritual life, the willingness to hold a scene until something unexpected rises to the surface. But underneath that patience runs a second, livelier current; this is also a dysfunctional family road movie, with a bickering multigenerational ensemble split between a van, where a man named Sakol and his mother ride, and another car of family members trailing behind. The two modes sit in productive but not always comfortable tension with each other. The result is tender, funny, and wise.
Sakol (Surachai Ningsanond) is a middle-aged man whose defining characteristic is that he does whatever his boss tells him. He learns from said boss, who has had a vision, that his mother may die unless the family visits nine temples in a single day to make merit. And so three generations pile into the two vehicles: Sakol, his wife, his brother, his sister, assorted children, and the grandmother herself (Amara Ramnarong), around whom the entire enterprise supposedly revolves and who is, from the outset, completely nonplussed by it. She drifts in and out of apparent sleep, stares out of the window at a city she barely recognises, and feigns exhaustion whenever anyone expects her participation. Whether her weariness is because she is dying or merely tired of her family is a question the film is wise enough to keep open.
The film opens at a rehearsal for a funeral, the crackling of an old gramophone record threading through the scene, the past intruding on the present and haunting it. Chidgasornpongse sets the action in Samut Prakan, his hometown, a port city where Western ships first made contact with Siam and where Bangkok’s main airport now stands. A place, as he describes it, where traditional and modern ways of thinking diverge – as the two vehicles will themselves diverge on the road between temples. The result is a journey into what it means to be a family.
Cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg lets the camera drift from the family to take in temple murals, their painted figures representing a philosophy increasingly at odds with the world moving past the van window. When the highway carries them past a colossal industrial plant, the film barely pauses. Look, mum, our house turned into a glass recycling factory, they say. Then the view is swallowed up by row upon row of cargo containers. The material world accumulates and consumes.
This tension between the material and the supposedly transcendent is the film’s most productive register. A scene in which monks methodically open up transparent plastic crates and sort donated offerings, packets, tins, bottles of Yogi brand cough syrup, into a massive storeroom has the quality of a quiet joke that keeps getting funnier the more you sit with it. Perhaps this is what the escape from samsara looks like in practice: neatly catalogued goods on clean shelves, a mini Amazon fulfilment centre operating in reverse.
The family’s sceptics are as interesting as its believers. Tor (Sompop Songkampol) refuses to accept that any of this means anything, and voices the film’s most awkward observation when he points out that the Buddha will always have one up on them because he was born a prince. Perhaps the path to enlightenment is a trap designed to distract us from class struggles. Elsewhere, a grandson confesses that meditation once caused him to want to die, and that when he raised this with a monk, he was informed, firmly but without drama, that no, a desire for personal death is not enlightenment. He gave up meditation. Another of the grandsons is drawn into what initially seems like a warm conversation with a young monk about vocation, before a faint discomfort creeps in about whether the attention is entirely benign. The film is alert to the ways in which institutions, religious or otherwise, exercise power over people who approach them in good faith.
The central psychological thread, that Sakol is projecting his own childhood feelings of abandonment onto this elaborate display of filial devotion, is intriguing. His family’s barely concealed suspicion that the pilgrimage is more about him than his mother, the bitterness that surfaces when this is mentioned, the grandmother’s studied indifference to the whole operation: these are handled delicately and ambiguously, carried in glances and small silences. But where the film struggles is pace, and at 140 minutes the struggle is a real one. Those long, still scenes work when they accumulate pressure, but there are stretches where the air simply goes out of the film.
One passage earns its duration completely: an eclipse interrupts the journey mid-film, the frame clouding and distorting without warning, something genuinely strange breaking through the domestic comedy. It is the moment where the film’s two registers stop competing and briefly become one thing.
There is real humanity in 9 Temples to Heaven, and for all its unevenness it is worth seeing. It works in the gap between spiritual aspiration and material life, between what families do for each other and what they actually want from each other, between the Pali language of ancient scripture and the glass recycling factories built over the landscape of old. The number nine recurs throughout, and Chidgasornpongse is clearly alive to its freight. In Thai, gao sounds like the word for progress, for moving forward. It carries the Nine Qualities of the Buddha, the nine realms of existence, and the deep royal resonance of King Rama IX’s seven-decade reign.
In Chidgasornpongse’s view, Thai society repeats the same rituals again and again, without necessarily moving toward prosperity. The family must give an offering of 9,999 baht. There are nine family members. There are nine temples. At one of them, a gleaming nine-storey building contains a relic of the Buddha and, the monk helpfully notes, a good view. It also has a spiral staircase for ascending to heaven. But there is an elevator, he adds, for the elderly or infirm. Or perhaps for those in more of a hurry.
9 Temples to Heaven played at the Cannes Film Festival.