Mike McCahill 

36 review – a flicker-book study of a photo hoarder

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's innovative film is an object lesson in what can be achieved without flashy camerawork, writes Mike McCahill
  
  

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 36
A distinctive if slight experience … Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 36 Photograph: PR

Thai writer-director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit presents us with three-dozen single shots, lasting two or three minutes apiece; operating rather like a slo-mo flicker book, these come to track several years in the life of a location scout with a tendency towards photo-hoarding. Formally, it's not so far from Kiarostami's Five or Ten, or its producer Aditya Assarat's blissful Hi-So, which cast a similar spell with the same basic ingredients: image as memory, people wandering among symbolic rubble. Thamrongrattanarit works hard on this exercise, eliciting wry chuckles from one character's frustrated attempts to retrieve his email password, and palpable poignancy when another dies, leaving those remaining with only images like these – becalmed moments, suspended in time – to remember them by. Succumb to its peaceable rhythms, and it adds up to a distinctive if slight experience – an object lesson in what can be achieved without recourse to frenetic cutting or camera-twirling.

 

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