The documentary by Rafał Skalski tells the story of a thirty-year-old car dealer from Bangkok. Ball works hard and plays hard. He spends entire days at the car dealership, while at night he goes to parties full of drugs, alcohol, and sex. One day, the young man decides to join a monastery. It isn’t an unusual decision. In Thailand, 70 percent of men become temporary monks. According to tradition, every man ought to join a monastery and become a Buddhist monk – even for a few days – once in his lifetime.
For Ball, this poses an opportunity to prove that he is a grown man. He abandons his extravagant lifestyle and goes to the Wat Khun Samut Trawa monastery, to become a Buddhist monk for two weeks. This is where he meets the abbot, who used to be a criminal, but many years back joined the monastery and stayed there permanently. Living in the monastery by the ocean, he leads a battle with natural forces – he constantly rebuilds the monastery buildings washed away by the sea, whose level rises each year. The abbot decides to erect a big figure of Buddha which is to protect the monastery from the forces of nature.
To me, this is an instant kind of spirituality. We want to get a lot of things done in one go – quickly fall in love, make a career, be successful. This is also how some Thais approach becoming a temporary monk. They think that now they will change, look inside themselves, find the meaning of life, be quietened.
– Rafał Skalski said about his film in a conversation with Urszula Lipińska from Spark Magazine.
Skalski’s film is an attempt at understanding what is behind a young person’s decision to join a Buddhist monastery. Is a two-week stay nothing more than a game, a need to fulfil a social ritual, or is it an invitation to a spiritual transformation?
Those people are actually consecrated, just like priests-to-be are over here, and during the period of their life as monks they are fully respected, on the same level as the long-term monks. Afterwards, they go through a ritual of ‘desacralisation,’ of signing out, and the fact that they are abandoning that state is not treated as a sin, unlike here, where departure from the priesthood leads to excommunication.
– the author of the film says.
Whilst painting the portrait of a boy who is looking for his own path in life, Skalski simultaneously talks about Thai culture, where ascetic and hedonistic forces meet. Thailand, as seen by Skalski, is a place where wild consumerism meets a centuries-long religious tradition, and the social rituals that remain unchanged for years become a substitute for religious experiences.
With Monk of the Sea, Rafał Skalski proves that he has the ability to enter the intimate world of his protagonists. Just like in 52 Percent from 2006, where he created a moving story about a Russian girl who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer, and in Lovers from 2009, where he took viewers into the intimate world of handicapped persons, representing their sexuality and feelings, this time around he shows a man who wants to exit the race of life for a while, in order to see whether he really wants to partake in it.
Monk of the Sea
Screenplay and director: Rafał Skalski. Cinematography: Filip Drożdż. Music:
Kuba Ziołek. Editing: Filip Drzewiecki. Poland 2016.
Sources: SparkMagazine, own materials. ed. BS, transl. AM, September 2016.