As far as contemporary art directors go, it’s hard to think of anyone more inventive and original than
Syndromes is divided into two equally ravishing parts. The first is set in the aforementioned clinic in the country and assumes the point of view of a female doctor as she goes through her day and, in what may be the most memorable sequence of the film, remembers an encounter with a horticulturalist. If all of this sounds a tad, well, boring or uninteresting, it’s only because words can’t describe the breathtaking way Joe manages to capture the quotidian, turning a simple static shot of a green field into a transcendent moment.
The second part of the film, in contrast to the opening hour, takes place in a city hospital, and once again a doctor is applying for a job. This time around he, not the interviewer, will be the focus of these sequences, allowing Joe to draw parallels between the two halves, even going so far as to restage several scenes we have already seen.
The film, like the director’s previous work, Tropical Malady, 2004’s lovely rumination on the romance between a country boy and a soldier, eschews the modus operandi of traditional narrative filmmaking in place of something altogether new. Syndromes and a Century borrows from the avant-garde, most notably in the enigmatic penultimate sequence in which we observe several objects at the modern hospital with an almost Tatiesque sense of wonder. It’s obvious that Joe is thinking of the comparisons between the old and the new, the rural and the modern, but none of these themes are ever hammered. He is nothing if not an extremely subtle filmmaker, getting his point across more by the feel of a particular scene—whether it be of an orchid on a tree, two girls sitting by a pond, or a dentist singing to his patient—than Brechtian didacticism. Engaging in equal parts as a spiritual and intellectual experience, Syndromes of a Century is an outstanding achievement and, in every sense of the word, a masterpiece.
