Tropical Malady
Starring: Sakda Kaewbuadee,Banlop Lomnoi
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Year: 2004
Review
With this winner of the Prix du Jury in Cannes in 2004 - the first Thai film to be shown in competition - Apichatpong Weerasethakul has proved himself one of the most brilliantly original directors in the world. UK audiences were deprived of his last film, Blissfully Yours (2002) - also award-winning, also bifurcated - whose day-out-in-the-jungle sexual fable might have prepared them for the cocktail of bestial strangeness that is Tropical Malady.
The first section of this movie is delightful, though the mood of upcoming unease is signalled from the very first shot: a chirpy group of Thai soldiers pose for photographs while on patrol. The hand-held camera only slightly swerves down at the last minute to show that they are trophy-posing over a recovered corpse. For most of the rest of this section, however, the camerawork is resolutely static, the soundtrack awash with loud ambient sound, like the background noise of a phone-call from a noisy place to a quiet place. It's no surprise to learn that the tiger-spirit in the second section of the movie has a special fascination with the soldier's walkie-talkie: the film has the spooked air of one long phone-call from the subconscious.
The gay love-story which is the kernel of the first section asks for no special treatment; much of it is filmed like the universal gay love story made everywhere in many countries around the world, though it is perhaps unusually discreet in execution here, without a shred of sexual-politics. That said, Chicago-educated Weerasethakul has a shrewd eye for detail - the sparing use of camp is especially judicious - and the modern way of saying things. In some ways these are stereotypes of Thai gay culture - the entwined hands, the flowery protestations of love, the sentimental songs on stage, the accepting family members - which Weerasethakul is setting up to derail with his later blast of rotting jungle matter, rutting animal desires, transmigrating sex and death. Not even Buddhism survives as this night falls, with its progression of kitschy little monk stories and the ephemeral trash laid at shrines in underground caves, including a toy that plays inappropriate Christmas carols.
The first section in some ways functions as a trap for the unwary, posing as an ordinary piece of indistinctly empowering soap opera, and the brief intermediate section a kind of picturesque fairytale about Khmer shamans. But it is Weerasethakul's intention to go directly and strongly to the world of Joseph Beuys and William Blake, and by the time we get to the second section he is determined to evoke a place that is defiantly other-worldly. The darkness of this jungle is infinite, and Weerasethakul is careful to leave it dark. Sometimes we can barely make out the soldier, shivering with dread, at the centre of the second part of the film until perhaps he moves his flashlight over some gnarled greenery and strangler-figs, or fireflies light up a tree in a chorus of unearthly photo-luminescence. Weerasethakul's passion for the forest floor is also considerable: few have ever attended to its structure in such detail, with its paw-prints, twigs, dead leaves, snail shells, fly-blown turds, leeches and most of all mud. It is only by smearing himself with mud, like Arnie in Predator, that the soldier stands any chance of outwitting his tiger-spirit nemesis.
At times the film brings to mind the famous toy, created for the ruler of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, in the 18th century, where a large orange tiger sits over an incapacitated Englishman who screams as he is devoured. But the characters in this film have a clear choice between killing the tiger and giving themselves up to it and joining it in the world of spirit; in one of the most effective scenes the stalking soldier begins to understand what a baboon-like ape is saying to him from the trees. "The tiger trails you like a shadow/his spirit is starving and lonesome/I see you are his prey and his companion."
This is a work of outstanding originality and power that comes nearer to the condition of the quest and the dream-state than any film in recent years. It requires a relaxed and open mind to watch it, be consumed by it, and enjoy its great and fearful symmetry.
Roger Clarke
This review appeared in the March 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.
Posted in Best Films Watched In 2004 | Permalink