Mysterious Object at Noon is an experimental film out of Thailand that mixes documentary with fiction by tapping into the culture's story-telling tradition, but goes a step beyond, playing with form, but having different people start, continue and end the story. The director mixes dramatizations of the story, interviews with the story-tellers, behind the scenes moments, and straight documentary showing how people live, and he leaves it to the audience to link all the material into the story being told, and we sometimes do. But it's an experiment that's allowed to fail, not necessarily sculpted into a proper shape. Quite honestly, it's a rough experience, made with poor equipment, more interesting in concept than in execution. But there IS something to it. The story told is less interesting than the people who tell it. I kept going back to just what makes any given person add what they did to the evolving story. Young or old, working alone or as a group, in person or on an answering machine, they are a varied lot, telling a genre-bending story that ultimately makes little sense. But trying to divine their perspectives through the act of story-telling, THAT'S rather interesting.

I really tried to open myself up to this but found it less than compelling.