by Joel Bocko
#55 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.
We’ve heard that love’s a bitch, and a battlefield, but in the 2004 Thai film Tropical Malady, writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells us it’s a tiger too. Or at least that’s one interpretation. Actually, at times it can be hard to know exactly what Apichatpong is after. As with the filmmaker’s later Syndromes and a Century (reviewed in a previous incarnation of this series), Tropical Malady divides neatly into two halves, but the way the halves relate to each other is different. In Syndromes, the different parts of the film are symmetrical, like parallel lines – they relate similar events in radically different surroundings. Malady on the other hand connects its first half and second half with a joint and then lets them spin in entirely different directions, until the thread connecting them seems stretched awful thin. The two halves are perpendicular rather than parallel – maybe they’re better considered as two separate films, but here they are presented together, their interconnections left for us to tease out.
For the first hour or so, the film tenderly follows a blossoming romance between Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), a soldier, and Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), a villager whose home Keng stays in. For a long stretch, their mutual attraction remains buried – we can sense it in Keng’s longing gazes at the boy, but it remains unclear if the more taciturn Tong shares Keng’s feelings. Indeed, the savvy mother seems to pick up on Keng’s love before Tong does. Meanwhile, the “narrative” flows along, not in one clear stream but many little eddies which wind their way through the picture. There are plenty of grace notes, anecdotal asides, little adventures – Weerasethakul is a director who drinks in distracting details, making them a part of his movies’ fabric. He takes a sensual approach to the world, civilized and natural alike, weaving a thick texture of sensory experience that is as important as – or more important than – any story being told.
But a story does unfold, as Tong slowly reciprocates Keng’s gestures. It becomes clear that while Keng is the more aggressive lover – actively pursuing Tong, flirting with him, putting his hand on Tong’s knee in a movie theater – he is also the more vulnerable. When the two descend into a claustrophobic cave deep underground, it is Keng who panics and wants to leave, Tong who teases and comforts him. Keng seems to know everyone around town, appears more sophisticated and experienced, and his demeanor and build are bigger, tougher-looking. Tong, on other hand, is slight, boyish, shy. Yet Tong’s gently withdrawn nature can become a implacable mask, and at times his quiet smile seems almost Sphinx-like, challenging Keng to fall under his spell, letting his soul be snatched. Which brings us to the second half: Keng sits on Tong’s bed, fingering a snapshot from years before and the film flickers and flashes. A drawing of a tiger emerges onscreen and new credits roll: from now on a narrator (or is the tiger’s voice?) and onscreen titles will guide us through the enactment of a folk tale. The legend of a tiger whose soul, severed from its body, haunts the jungle is retold with Keng and Tong’s romance in mind.
Or at least it seems to be, though the correspondences are inexact. While I’ve noted Tong’s passive power over Keng, to reconfigure the young man as a prowling tiger, openly dangerous and savage, is to distort the picture we’ve seen. One could posit it as Keng’s imaginings of the boy, or a projection of his own uncontrollable emotions onto the figure who provokes them, but it’s still somewhat confusing to see a naked Tong crawling through the ferns (he shifts between human and animal form), growling and tossing Keng into ravines. The shift in tone and style is startling as well – the second half of Malady is intensely controlled and focused, eschewing all the distractions Weerasethakul embraced initially in order to follow Keng through a slowly paced, often repetitive hunt through the woods. It’s a bold development, and commands our admiration but at times – at least to me – it also seemed too self-conscious an experiment, as if the conception carried all the meaning and left the execution hanging. At its most indulgent, Act II can play like a more restrained version of the Cremaster cycle, an art project audaciously conceptual and hard to take at dramatic face value.
However, there are a number of striking, absorbing visuals, from the folk drawings Weerasethakul introduces from time to time (this as as close as he will come to collage-like asides of Act I) to the image of a tree whose leaves seem to be moving, dancing in the dusk – are those fireflies or flitting souls moving amongst its branches? There has been an undercurrent of melancholy, even darkness, from the get-go; the film opens with the soldiers finding a dead body in a field and playfully posing next to it. While flipping through the DVD before beginning the movie I ran across a trailer for a Leopold-Loeb movie; misunderstanding its presence on the disk, I half-expected the nice boys of Tropical Malady to turn sociopathically murderous by the end of the film. Were they to go from a quiet couple to a quasi-Bonnie & Clyde, a newfound Sailer & Lula, whose romance carries them over into transgressive violence? Not quite (unless you consider the closing dream literal and the cattle victims of the tiger tragic).
Yet there may be other David Lynch connections to be found, even if Wild at Heart is not exactly evoked. Yes, there’s the discovery of a dead body (“Twin Peaks”) in a field (Blue Velvet). More important, the structure of the story seems subtly evocative of Mulholland Dr. (spoilers for that film ahead). Like Lynch, Weerasethakul divides his love story into a more literal representation of the romance and an intense, metaphorical dream which elevates the lovers to mythological status. Both films evoke the vulnerability of the wounded lover, albeit in different contexts (it is not clear how Keng’s infatuation will end, and in Malady’s case, it is an immersion in love the dreamer fears, not rejection). And both remind us that sometimes we can best understand – or at the very least, gain new meanings – from a situation by digging into the unconscious, exploring myth, and filtering the everyday through a dreamlike prism. It’s a malady that’s not only tropical, but may be an undercurrent of all movies – syndromes for our century of cinema.
Superb review, MovieMan. And extra points for hitting on the Lynch connections. This is a terrific movie. It’s hard to point which half is the real one and which half is the fantasy. Any case, one of the decade’s best.
I saw it a couple times before writing this. First time, the second half left me cold, second time I liked it a bit more – but I still definitely prefer Syndromes and a Century. I’ve never seen his several other films – have you & how are they? These are the only two you ever seem to hear mentioned.
Yes, I have seen the director’s other films. Most of them are wonderful.
Mysterious Object At Noon – Probably his third best feature. I have written about it here: http://theseventhart.info/2009/11/22/flashback-70/
Blissfully Yours – A meditative essay on the inescapability of politics to lose onself in love. Superb movie.
Adventures of the Iron Pussy – A pure obligation, it seems like. A mediocre spoof with some very funny moments
Tropical Malady – His best film, IMO. Brilliant stuff.
Worldly Desires – A quirk medium length movie that clearly shows how Weerasethakul straddles “seriousness” and joviality
Syndromes and a Century – My second favorite film by Weerasethakul.
Mobile Men – Strange short, made in a modernist and deliberately amateurish way. Still haven’t been able to digest it.
Letter to Uncle Boonmee – A mysterious marriage of politics and personal trauma. Haunting stuff
Phantoms of Nabua – Highly formal avant-garde film that plays around with the film medium.
Thanks a ton, JAFB. Before Syndromes & a Century I had not even heard of the director – ironically, since this is the only era I’ve been an adult moviegoer for, the 00s might be my worst-seen decade. American product was so discouraging I stopped going to theaters altogether. And I used the time to catch up with classics, which I don’t regret at all – but now’s a good time to make amends. That’s really the primary purpose of this series – I realize the TSPDT list is far from perfect but if it acquaints me with brilliant filmmakers like Wereasethakul (sp?) it can’t be all bad, can it?
Thanks for the link to your review too. It’s been bookmarked – I promised myself that, in taking a break from my own blog, I would not have more time to catch up with other ones, but it hasn’t happened yet. Blame Allan, Sam, and their infernal countdowns for distracting me! (Ha, ha…) Looking forward to your piece though.
This is a great piece on a film I personally consider one of the ten best of the new millenium. It’s the director’s greatest work, methinks, and I’ll be back later this evening to leave a serious comment.
[…] Tropical Malady (2004, Thailand/France/Germany/Italy/Switzerland), dir. Apichatpong […]
Very interesting review, Movie Man, especially with your cinematic parallels.
The overall mood in this film mixes graceful formality, and a hazy blissed-out romanticism; as with “Blissfully Yours” and “Mysterious Object at Noon”, credits appear far into the film, offering the impression that one is viewing the interrelated excerpts of intricate larger narratives, rather than a conventional ‘story’ film with a neat beginning, middle and end. But this is a favorite stylistic device of Weerasethakul.
“Weerasethakul is a director who drinks in distracting details, making them a part of his movies’ fabric. He takes a sensual approach to the world, civilized and natural alike, weaving a thick texture of sensory experience that is as important as – or more important than – any story being told.”
“There has been an undercurrent of melancholy, even darkness, from the get-go”
Aye, Joel, I couldn’t agree with you more, and this is really the essence of Weerasethakul’s cinema, which leads me to move to dismiss your issues with some of it’s experimental aspects, which may seem self-conscious, at the point of that abrupt break there between the two parts of the film.
“Like Lynch, Weerasethakul divides his love story into a more literal representation of the romance and an intense, metaphorical dream which elevates the lovers to mythological status. Both films evoke the vulnerability of the wounded lover, albeit in different contexts (it is not clear how Keng’s infatuation will end, and in Malady’s case, it is an immersion in love the dreamer fears, not rejection).”
This is a most interesting connection here, and kudos to you for the specific validations, so well conveyed. I’d add that it’s as rich an inquiry into the relationship between man and nature since Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE, and that it’s elipsed Wong Kar Wei’s HAPPY TOGETHER as a poignant romance. Hence much in the tradition of Malick, TROPICAL MALADY is a tone poem, a mood piece.
Says Ed Gonzalez of SLANT:
Both love story, (first-half) and folk tale, (second half), Tropical Malady intersects eros with cultural traditions, heralding the thrill of the chase and asserting that the deepest romances are not sexual but spiritual in nature. Literally.
As an Indian, I came away wishing we had made a movie like this. To me the first part is full of the quotidian – an immersion in modern Asian life so to speak – and the second half is like the details of an oral folk tale of some ancient past resurrected out of the surrounding forests and somehow the two just mesh. It’s a very strange ride but a mesmerising one.
Bill, I love that touch as well. Two American movies which I thought used that device to great effect in the past decade: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fahrenheit 9/11.
Anu, for some reason the two halves didn’t quite mesh for me – though they did in Syndromes & a Century. I respect the gesture and it seemed to work for most people but while I can intellectually admire what Wereasethakul is doing, somehow I felt a bit distanced from the second half. Which brings me to…
Sam, the thing about experimental gestures is that one’s best judgement of them comes from the subjective effect (as they’re usually meant to evoke a kind of dream state – contrary to many skeptics’ beliefs the avant-garde is generally not about intellectual obfuscation but a more direct emotional experience). I don’t think this is the FINAL judgement, but it becomes difficult to accept the “success” of a gesture if it doesn’t quite “click” for you. Hence I definitely think I’m missing something with Tropical Malady’s second half, since just about everyone else loved it but at the same time I had to register my skepticism for whatever it’s worth. It’s weird too because I usually like the kind “stalking the beast through the woods” type of thing (I once made a similar type of film myself). Ah well. It’ll probably click for me one day. The first half definitely worked for me, at any rate.
I’ll be very interested to see the director’s other films too, though I don’t think there are any more on this particular list…
MovieMan the supernatural/reincarnation is almost a part of everyday life with the Thais and most Asian allegorical tales feature forests and tigers which is why I felt that complete fade out and then entering into another world which is still linked to the one that went by made sense. I haven’t seen any other film that was so effective in bringing together these separate aspects of Asian life. I loved Mysterious Object at Noon and Blissfully Yours too (bought them in Thailand where almost no one watches these films!!).
ศูนย์จำหน่ายผลิตภัณฑ์เสริมอาหารเพื่อสุขภาพ ความงามและกระชับสัดส่วน จากศูนย์วิจัยพัฒนามังคุดไทย รับรองผลงานวิจัย ซึ่งรับรองคุณภาพโดยการส่งออกจำหน่ายต่างประเทศแล้ว 28 ประเทศทั่วโลก และเป็นงานวิจัยของนักวิทยาศาสตร์ไทยคนแรกและกลุ่มแรกของโลกที่วัจัย มังคุด อย่างต่อเนื่อง 30 กว่าปีแล้ว
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well, quite – couldn’t have put it better myself.
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