On paper, artist and film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest project sounds desperately worthy – it’s all about migrant Bangladeshi labourers doing low-paid jobs in the United Arab Emirates. In fact, though, ‘Dilbar’ (the title means ‘beloved’ in Hindi) is completely captivating. Shot in black-and-white, the film is much more concerned with mood and atmosphere than explicit social message. Although it nominally focuses on a single young worker, there’s not much in the way of a coherent storyline, just a sequence of slow, poetic images: cell-like sleeping quarters; an urban skyline of endless satellite dishes; throngs of immigrants waiting by the side of the road for employment.
The feeling you get is of a fragmented, dreamlike indeterminacy. In fact, since one shot features the main character dozing, the entire film might be meant as a dream – of escape, perhaps. Superimposed images overlap, bleed together, repeat themselves. The sound of a water-boring machine permeates the soundtrack so that the visuals start to jump and stutter in time with the rhythmic pounding. Most effective of all is the way the film is projected: from behind, on to a suspended glass panel, giving a strangely hazy, sun-blanched effect, and immersing you in reflections that spill and scatter around the room.
In the upstairs gallery, some earlier works by the Thai filmmaker (he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 for his elemental, uplifting film ‘Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives’) continue this mood of dreaming and ambiguity. Three videos shot on mobile phones show close-ups of a sleeping person’s face, gradually waking up to the fact of being filmed. Weerasethakul’s first film, from 1999, depicts reflections on a television screen – yet the TV signal interferes with the camera recording, causing the image to erupt with strobing, whirling abstract patterns. It’s at once beautiful and queasily disorientating.
Gabriel Coxhead