A Hospital Where the Spirit Comes Before the Body

"It's a kind of magic for living," is how the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul recently described the power of movies. His words are only slightly less enigmatic than the title of his latest feature film, "Syndromes and a Century," which opens today at the IFC Center. But in experiencing this marvelous work of gentle beauty and serenity, you begin to understand what he's talking about.

What makes "Syndromes and a Century" special is hard to describe but easy to feel. The disparate scenes of life, love, chatter, absurdity, all set in and around a Thai hospital, are less important than the disarming sense of joyous being with which they are imbued. There's nothing quite like it elsewhere in movies today, and Mr. Apichatpong, who alchemized the feeling with desire for the mythopoeic tiger tales of 2004's "Tropical Malady," has found an uncommon purity of expression.

"Syndromes" shares with "Tropical Malady" a — dare I say it — Siamese structure: two halves intimately yet mysteriously bound up. Part one opens with a job interview at a hospital involving a doctor and her hapless applicant, who opines that DDT stands for "Destroy Dirty Things." Buddhist monks seek treatment, a singing dentist and a monk strike up a bond, and the interviewing doctor fends off an admirer with a digressive anecdote about an earlier, orchid-loving suitor. Lush emerald greenery surrounds the hospital, their fronds caressing the windows.

Part two opens with virtually the same interview scene, now set in a whiter, sleeker, more modern office and with different camera angles. Before you can guess what Mr. Apichatpong might be up to — a next-generation replay? — the similarities dissolve and we head to a basement staff room to hang out with a couple of tippling older ladies and a younger man. In the hallway, a boy suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning bounces a ball against resounding doors. In another room, the air eerily fills with mist and the camera is drawn inexorably to the perfect black hole of a pipe.

"Syndromes," which is luminously shot, helps make its reality glow by sharing in its characters' casual experience and, as applicable, their free-floating vibes and stirrings of love. It's a different way of relating, less psychological than spiritual. You could find a moment of "drama," say, when a young doctor and his girlfriend, meeting clandestinely, realize they probably will be separated by the travel demands of her work. But far more powerful and characteristic is an earlier moment that finds us gliding out of doors to a green grassy field and produces a sublime feeling of emergence, lulled by the sound of two off-screen voices in friendly conversation.

A spiritual element arises from the reincarnation suggested by the doubled halves (and the use of many of the same actors). Yet this is not a film that aims to fix meaning. The hospital setting, which Mr. Apichatpong has used before, may evoke the medical mission of preserving life through precise evaluation and interpretation (recall again the "syndromes" of the title), but the metaphysics of the movie remain wide open and welcoming.

If all that sounds hopelessly abstract, you can take comfort in the sweetly autobiographical origins of the film. In his mission statement for "Syndromes," Mr. Apichatpong writes of imagining the history of his parents, both doctors. Overlaid on that yearning, personal nostalgia is a sense of national memory that views Thailand in both less and more modern incarnations and finds degrees of rapture within each.

The current Thai government hasn't quite shared in the rapture; The notorious censorship board demanded extensive cuts when the film was ready for release in Thailand last year. Mr. Apichatpong has withdrawn the film from his home country (and circulated a petition) rather than excise such scandalous material as monks flying a kite and a doctor kissing at work.

But "Syndromes and a Century," which was originally commissioned for a far-ranging Austrian festival on the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, has found welcoming homes across the world, wowing and, frankly, bewildering international festival audiences. (At last fall's New York Film Festival, it was a quieter revolution alongside David Lynch's nightmare-churning "Inland Empire.") It's a happy event when a filmmaker as innovative as Mr. Apichatpong gets any sort of distribution, and even more pleasurable when the film and its maker elicit such basic life-affirming trust in the art without being any less adventurous.