(Sang sattawat). Apichatpong Weerasethakul's radiant follow-up to Tropical Malady opens with sunlight shining through branches swaying in the summer breeze, a fitting beginning for a film of becalmed wistfulness and beauty whose Thai title translates as "Light of the Century." Dedicated to Apichatpong's doctor parents, and loosely based on their recollections, Syndromes and a Century begins in a rural hospital that basks in a light so radiant it finds all doctors in love. Here dentists serenade their crushes with flossing-related karaoke, and even job interviews sound romantic. Later, in an antiseptic urban hospital bathed in fluorescence (the light of the new century), the same actors, playing similar characters, re-evoke their scenes, with loves and desires repeated like syndromes. Concerned with how memory (and, by extension, cinema) works to recall and rephrase stories and emotions, Syndromes and a Century is blissfully impervious to narrative concerns. But the film, commissioned for the Mozart-inspired New Crowned Hope festival, is as pleasurably seductive as an afternoon spent under those swaying trees.

—Jason Sanders

• Written by Apichatpong. Photographed by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. With Nantarat Sawaddikul, Jaruchai Iamaram, Saphon Pukanuk, Jenjira Pongpas. (105 mins, In Thai with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Strand Releasing)