Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

Nailing down an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film is as hard (and futile) as assigning "answers" to a Terrence Malick film. Like Malick, Weerasethakul builds on ideas from previous films, but Joe goes even further: he reuses not only themes and motifs but actors and even characters. Yet for all his variations on similar, even identical, material, Joe has never made two films exactly alike. Tropical Malady may be the clearest illustration of this, as it comprises two wildly different halves that, when viewed correctly, reveal themselves to be flip-sides of the same subject, approached with such a marked contrast that the two sections seem to share nothing but the same actors.

Coming to Tropical Malady after seeing the films that followed it, I can instantly see what Joe took with him to Syndromes and a Century and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The foundational idea of the latter comes from this film, in a tossed-off line by the illiterate country boy who would return to ease his uncle's passing years later, and the opening scene of soldiers lining up for a photo prefigures the La jetée-inspired still photograph sequence in Joe's latest triumph. Its ties to Syndromes run much deeper: Syndromes split its narrative between rural and urban, capturing the prosaic and poetic in each. Tropical Malady, on the other hand, moves between city and country (in one half, at least) but clearly demarcates a realistic first half from a magical, allegorical and abstract counterpart. This suggests two things: that Weerasethakul had not yet perfected his technique of blending the stark with the searching, and also that he marked such distinct divisions between the two to illustrate the potential and limitations of both.

In the first half, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), one of the aforementioned soldiers investigating a rash of livestock slaughter in a rural Thai village, meets Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), an illiterate country laborer who always seems to have a smile on his face. The two form a bond almost instantly and begin hanging out both in the countryside and in the city. Soon, their bond strengthens to the point that they occupy the nebulous territory between Platonic friendship and homosexual romance, their playful antics containing overt eroticism—Keng rubbing Tong's thigh in a movie as Tong puts his other leg over Keng's hand, little love notes that could be interpreted either way. Yet these suggestive moments are undercut by Tong's innocence, his unlearned, childlike ways of interacting with others. Joe drops thinly veiled hints of Keng's homosexuality via conversations he has with other men, but Tong comes off as a babe in the woods, and any flirtatious action toward Keng on his part seems largely copycat reciprocation as if learning how to communicate with people.

The motif of communication recurs throughout the film: cellphones and cellphone advertisements are ubiquitous in the city, posters printing words like "connection" in English. But cellphones do not particularly seem to connect people. Riding on a bus, Tong smiles at a woman with a hollow-eyed innocence that borders on leering predation. She smiles back awkwardly, only to pull out her phone and begin playing with it and chatting the way we all do when a situation is too uncomfortable. While out in the jungle at the very start and in the whole second half, Keng has a radio, but all it can pick up is a garbled voice. Eventually, it doesn't even get that, totally lost to static. The best communication occurs out in the countryside, away from all the distractions, but even then, rainfall and rustling wind bury the dialogue in the sound mix, revealing communication issues everywhere.

As previously noted, Joe frames the first half in static long takes emphasizing the realism of the mise-en-scène, all of it captured on-location and with an aesthetic that stresses artful composition but does not shift the world around the players. Weerasethakul captures the light whimsy of the budding romance: the soldiers smile for their picture in the opening seconds of the film, and smiles dot the faces of practically everyone for the first half, and even the fake ones on mall employees and nervous ones on uncomfortable bystanders.

No one has a wider smile than Sakda, but as Keng's pursuits become more aggressive, Tong becomes less and less relaxed, and confusion seeps into his face. At last, Keng kisses and licks Tong's hands and arms one night, and the smile slowly fades completely on Tong's face. He copies the act, as usual, but the naïve joy in him no longer comes across, and even he realizes it. Afraid of what's happening, Tong runs into the infinite black of the night outside the pocket of light around a lamp, leaving Keng to drive home in his motorcycle in one last montage of realist imagery of the countryside and the city in POV shots.

Then comes the second half, which segues without break into Keng resuming his hunt for the killer of local livestock. As Keng moves into the jungle, something about the film shifts imperceptibly, and the only warning is a second set of credits introducing the segment "A Spirit's Path." As Keng moves deeper into isolation in the endless foliage, the style shifts from the realism of much contemporary Asian art cinema into something more brazenly abstract, even cinematic.

Soon we learn that the killer of livestock is a shaman who can shift between human and animal form, occasionally taking the shape of a tiger. Joe casts Sakda as the shaman, who runs around making feral whoops and shrieks naked in his human form. For all the strangeness, the implication is clear: where the film's low-key first half showed building passion through Stoic realism and inventive framing around locations—the almost offensively bright wall where a woman sings, the idyll of the village—"A Spirit's Path" brings out the tangled web of emotions within.

Weerasethakul uses dense imagery, unorthodox, deadpan framing and low-lit night shots so dim the frame occasionally plunges into near or total darkness. If the building passions at the end of the first segment gently revealed themselves to be too strong to control, the second half visualizes the full, terrible power of unchecked desire. The last thing Keng looks at before heading into the jungle are photos of Tong, and he encounters a wild-eyed, nude vision of the simple boy out in the woods who can morph into an exotic (and erotic) creature. This sheds light on the quote by a Thai novelist that opened the film: "All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check and even teach them to perform tasks alien to their bestiality." When Keng confronts the tiger at the end (who stares directly at the camera as if as likely to lunge at the audience as Keng), the spirit says "I miss you, soldier." On the one hand, this statement almost sounds like a coy come-on from lingering memories of Tong, a stereotypical "Hello, sailor!" tempting Keng's desire. But perhaps the more vicious symbolism of the tiger comes into play here, the animal spirit of a killer beast wanting to see the soldier who perhaps used to do actually militaristic things like kill instead of hunt down cow thieves. The dual interpretations create a complex mesh of overwhelming desire and bestial aggression.

Illustrating this is a monkey that communicates with Keng via subtitled shrieks, telling the soldier that he must "kill [the tiger spirit] to free him from his ghost world or let him devour you and enter his world." If you don't see the sexual suggestion there, you're blind. The second half is more suggestive of death than sex, but it also illustrates how the two can co-mingle. Looked at from a certain light, Tropical Malady plays as a symbolic, pan-romantic Romeo and Juliet.

Just as important, Joe frames this latter half in blatantly cinematic terms, showing the limitations in long-take, long-shot realism in communicating the soul. He still uses a great deal of static, long shots, but the mise-en-scène warps around Keng instead of him simply being placed in front of it. Film history runs through Joe's work, culminating in this year's eulogy for classical film construction with Uncle Boonmee; here, he uses title cards as if the second half were a silent film (and, in long stretches, it more or less is, save for the sinister buzz and chirps of insects and other wildlife). It visualizes Keng's turbulent soul and the scary side of undiluted passion instead of having actors communicate this, either by spoken or body language, pulling it out of the realm of the theatrical and purely into film. Of course, without the grounding of the lovely, engaging first half, the second part of the diptych would be impenetrable hogwash inviting accusations of pretension. He's not assigning superiority, merely demarcating and exploring the two approaches.

You can't peg Weerasethakul down: just when his narrative divisions and stylistic and setting shifts suggest a love of dialectics, he goes for the whole hog with Uncle Boonmee and subdivides his story further. Tropical Malady might seem a response to the regional art cinema being made in conjunction with it, but Joe would move too quickly forward into yet more grace to seem particularly chastising. More than the other two, even the Hydra-structured Boonmee, Tropical Malady can seem disjointed. However, Joe covers an incredible amount of ground here, displaying his consideration of past and present (a Buddhist moral about greed finds a modern counterpoint in contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire who lose money by reaching beyond their grasp to get yet more cash), rural and urban (a natural outgrowth of the past and present dichotomy), physical and metaphysical. It set off a string of masterpieces by the director on these topics, each building off the last and smoothing out the transitions between his splits. But those divisions still exist; in that sense, it's difficult to view Tropical Malady as an outright critical piece, as it sparked a series of features and short films that prove, with each superior upgrade, that Joe still has room to grow. So does everyone in every field, of course, but what makes Joe's case so special is that he drags the goal posts for the potential of cinema along with him as he goes.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011)

The grass almost literally looks greener in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies: of all the modern poets of the cinema, "Joe" is by far the most tactile. Though his glacially paced films may create a distance that makes even Terrence Malick or Abbas Kiarostami seem visceral, Weerasethakul is the best at crafting worlds one can nearly reach out and touch. Unlike the masterful contemporary filmmakers whose company Joe enjoys, the Thai director does not intellectualize his reveries. Shots follow characters speaking until suddenly the focus shifts onto another group, an animal or even plant life. It's as if Weerasethakul sets up his shots based on what's the most interesting element in the frame, even if that means moving away from a previous setup altogether. This gives his films a universality he shares with other seemingly esoteric and geocentric filmmakers like Kiarostami or Jia Zhangke, and his ability to mine more abstract metaphysical subjects than the others occasionally makes him stand out even against his hero Abbas.

As I still need to see a few of his films, and because I value the films I have seen so highly, I cannot say whether Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is truly Joe's finest film to date. It is, however, his most ambitious, taking the cross-dimensional split narrative of his erstwhile magnum opus, Syndromes and a Century, to further extremes. That film bifurcated its romance between pairs of country and urban doctors, but Uncle Boonmee moves across the threshold from life to death and back again.

The "story" of a Weerasethakul film is usually its least important aspect, and that's true here. But like Joe's other movies, the thin plot leads in fascinating, surreal directions. The titular Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), who returns to his farm near the Laotian border to die of renal failure, the same region he's been charting with video projects and the short films A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua -- this feature is the culmination of all these works for his art project Primitive. There are no histrionics to Boonmee's inevitable death: his sister-in-law, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), does not want to hear any talk of his mortality, but she is as resigned to Boonmee's fate as he is. A nephew, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), and caretaker, Jaai (Samud Kugasang) help the man be comfortable, but he seems to accept any pain as karma for his part in the anti-Communist purge of the Isan region in the '60s.

Complicating an old man's tranquil but slow death, however, is the sudden appearance of the ghost of his dead wife, as well as his estranged son, who shows up looking like a simian shadow with glowing red eyes and claiming to be a Monkey Ghost. Joe's framing in these reveals is fantastic: he arranges the living family all at the right side of the table, obeying the rule of thirds but creating such a huge amount of empty space in the middle and left sections that the eye is as drawn to nothingness as it is the action. Slowly, the wife, Huay, materializes in the empty chair facing the camera; she's so silent that the family doesn't notice her at first.

No one freaks out when Huay and Boonsong emerge from the forest to talk to Boonmee, nor do they even waste time on small chat -- what do you say to a ghost about the weather anyway? The old man accepts this vision and talks about hoping Huay was well wherever she was in the afterlife, while Huay's sister Jen asks if she got the items she left at the temple. Talk then moves to Boonmee's impending death. Maybe that's why the conversations all seem to concern only the important questions: the man understands he would just be wasting time by asking questions like "What is the afterlife like?" since he'll be there soon to see for himself.

Instead, Uncle Boonmee meditates on the tragedies, regrets, even absurdities of this life, using death merely as a vantage point, but not the omniscient one we tend to think it offers. The clearest idea of what lies beyond comes when Boonmee asks his wife where he might go to look for her in death. "In heaven?" he asks, unable to ask the alternative. "Heaven is overrated. There's nothing to do there," Huay responds with her disaffected flatness (her detached ennui makes for a recurring bit of physical humor). The spirits instead serve to help bring out Boonmee's memories of this life and previous ones while also calming him for his future. The guidance they offer is emotional.

Joe, the child of two doctors and no stranger to wards of the infirm and dying, looks upon his sickly characters with grace and empathy. Jen walks with a cane and an orthopedic shoe, heavily shuffling around this rural farm and clearly struggling with the rougher terrain. Unbroken shots show Jaai hooking up Boonmee's dialysis; there's something inherently funny about a long static shot, and the look of ennui on the old man's face as the young man connects tubes and sacks carries a mild humor. But that bored look also communicates a "Is this how it's really going to be?" defeatism, and Joe sympathizes with the unremarkable deaths of those who used to live more exciting, even terrible, lives. The most moving shot of the film shows Boonmee suddenly hugging Huay for comfort, not to prepare for death but out of fear that his actions as a soldier might prevent him from seeing her in the afterlife.


That mixture of the personal and political runs through the film, and Weerasethakul's corpus at large. He displays a more thorough understanding of the political turmoil that has affected economies, geographies and populations than Kiarostami, but he has the Iranian master's ability to focus on the personal reaction, to avoid polemics in the search of a greater truth. The journeys through Boonmee's past, present and future lives all contain elements of politics: even the vision he has of his beginning in a lake where a magical catfish seduces a disfigured princess contains traces of personalized politics, the rich princess mistaking intimacy with an obedient servant for love and casting aside all her wealth to the lake spirits in exchange for...beauty? Sexual gratification? It is unclear. A future vision shows Boonmee as a Monkey Ghost captured by younger soldiers, still photographs adding a surreal flavor to horribly familiar shots of hunting Communists in the jungle. Those monkey spirits more and more resemble the ghosts of the Communists Boonmee helped kill, so perhaps it is his karma to be captured and abused by the next generation of soldiers.

Uncle Boonmee follows the idea of Buddhist cycles of consciousness, but Joe's ruminations go beyond any one religion, and even any one plane of reality. As I argued in my review of Phantoms of Nabua, his burning of an outdoor projection screen, leading to the light of the projector casting out into the air and smoke, tore down the distinction between cinema and reality, mingling the past contained in film and the present outside the projection to find the way forward for this region, all of Thailand and the world itself.

As Boonmee contemplates his own past lives, Joe delves into the past iterations of cinema itself. The surreal incident with the catfish has airs of costume drama (mannered princess letting go to find more human fulfillment), while the present-day journey to the cave of origin where that scene took place is shot with documentary-like verité. The acting and framing throughout oscillates between Joe's freer, painterly style and the more mannered setup of theatrical acting and blocking. When Boonmee shows Boonsong and Huay old photo albums of all they missed in their absence, Boonsong recalls the interest in photography that led him to discover the Monkey Ghosts and mate with them, and flashbacks show honest-to-goodness film being developed in a dark room instead of digital files cleaned up in Photoshop.

An answer to the finality of Western conceptions of death and the permanence of the afterlife, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives sets all the planes of existence on an elliptical orbit, though what metaphysical star they revolve around is anyone's guess. In his view, past, present and future are united, the past of one life informing the present of another and pointing toward the future of yet more lives and realities. If postmodernism seeks to flatten distinctions and barriers, Weerasethakul, who relies less on pastiche than nearly any other current filmmaker, may be the most thoughtful postmodernist in cinema. Or perhaps he's already looking beyond, seeking to mix his postmodernism with his classicism (if his love of the past does not extend even further back into ancient prehistory).

Despite the sequence gaps in my Weerasethakul viewing, everything I've seen so far has progressed from what came before while also incorporating all past works. Uncle Boonmee consolidates everything -- his love of cinema (and subsequent fear of the death of film stock), his mixture of space and time, his soft romances. Naturally, the results are jumbled, but in the film's conflicting grace, humor, mystery and even frustration lies something of this world and worlds beyond. The film opens with an ox breaking free of its leash and running into the forest and ends with an out-of-body experience. Both are vexing scenes seemingly divorced from everything, but in their anticlimactic mini-resolutions is the idea that everything is going to be alright, and it is best not to expect any outcome in a world where seemingly anything is possible. If you let go, I promise it all makes some kind of sense by the time you're done.