Cinematic Forest

Language: Thai and Lao

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thai: ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ; RTGS: Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat) is a 2010 Thai drama film written, produced, and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The film, which explores themes of reincarnation, centers on the last days in the life of its title character, who is played by Thanapat Saisaymar. Together with his loved ones—including the spirit of his dead wife, Huay, and his lost son, Boonsong, who has returned in a non-human form—Boonmee explores his past lives as he contemplates the reasons for his illness.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was inspired by the 1983 book A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Buddhist abbot Phra Sripariyattiweti. The film is the final installment in a multi-platform art project by Apichatpong Weerasethakul called "Primitive". It premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, becoming the first Thai film to do so.

Plot:

In a grassy area, a water buffalo breaks free from a rope tethering it to a tree. It wanders into a forest, where it is spotted by a man holding a sickle. The man begins to lead it somewhere, while a silhouetted figure with red eyes watches.

Boonmee lives in a house on a farm with his sister-in-law Jen and his nephew Tong. Boonmee is suffering from a failing kidney; his Laotian assistant Jaai administers dialysis treatments to him. One night, while Boonmee, Jen and Tong are eating dinner together, the ghost of Boonmee's wife Huay appears. Huay, who died over a decade prior, says that she heard Jen and Boonmee's prayers for her, and is aware of Boonmee's poor health. A hairy, red-eyed figure ascends the stairs near the dinner table and is revealed to be Boonmee's long-lost son Boonsong. Boonsong, who practiced photography, had disappeared some years after Huay died. Boonsong was searching for a creature—whom he calls a "Monkey Ghost"—that he had captured in one of his photos. He says that he mated with a Monkey Ghost, causing his hair to grow longer and his pupils to dilate, and that, after meeting his mate, he forgot "the old world".

During the day, on the farm with Jen, Boonmee asserts that his illness is a result of karma. He claims that it was caused by his killing of communists while serving in the military, and his killing of bugs on the farm.

A princess is carried through a forest in a litter. She walks near a waterfall, and gazes into her reflection in the water, which she perceives to be more youthful and beautiful than her real appearance. She is kissed by one of her servants but insists that he imagined kissing her reflection. The servant departs, and she sits by the water and weeps. She is complimented by a catfish, prompting her to wade into the water. She makes offerings of her jewelry in return for being made to look like her reflection, and then has intercourse with the catfish.

Boonmee lies in bed near a sitting Huay. He hugs her and asks about how he might be able to find her in the afterlife. She tells him that the spirits of the deceased are not attached to locations, but to people. Later, Boonmee, Huay, Jen and Tong venture out into the forest. Jen and Tong see shadowy figures running through the brush and leaping between the trees. Huay leads Boonmee, Jen and Tong into a cave. Boonmee believes that he was born in the cave, in a life that he cannot recall. He recounts a dream of a future civilisation in which authorities shine "a light" on "past people", causing them to disappear. Huay disconnects Boonmee's dialysis tube. By the next day, Boonmee is dead.

Following Boonmee's funeral, Jen sits on a bed, organising gifts of baht with her friend Roong. Tong, now a monk, arrives, saying that he has been having difficulty sleeping at the temple. He showers and changes from his robes to a T-shirt and jeans. While preparing to go out to eat with Jen, he is stunned to see himself, Jen and Roong on the bed, watching television. He and Jen leave for a restaurant, while he, Jen and Roong remain on the bed.

By: Nick L.
Published: May 20, 2022

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' and Death as a New Beginning

In Weerasethakul’s films, death is never a final destination.

Since the advent of motion pictures, there have been films about death. Across the spectrum of cinematic history, these films have focused on subjects such as grief in Manchester by the Sea, memory in Big Fish, legacy in The Tree Of Life, or the eternal question of what lies beyond our realm of human understanding in The Seventh Seal to name a few. One of the best films currently playing in theaters is Vortex, the latest from arthouse provocateur Gaspar Noé: it is a film that, among other things, fearlessly confronts the ugly reality of how our bodies and minds fail us in old age. While some audiences may not wish to expose themselves to a surfeit of death-fixated movie offerings, it has remained true throughout the years that cinema itself continues to be one of our great conduits in terms of how we process death. Making a film, or even just seeing the right one, can help someone who is mired in the throes of grief to feel less alone.

The films of Thai genius Apichatpong Weerasethakul address death in a manner that is wholly unique. In Weerasethakul’s films, death is never a final destination. Instead, death is merely a passageway: a kind of boundary-less cosmic corridor that binds our earthly world to whatever mysteries lies beyond it. Simply put, in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, death is never the end of the line: on the contrary, it is often the beginning of something new.

Death and spiritual rebirth are critical components of Weerasethakul’s oeuvre, just as certain so-called "supernatural" elements are often accepted as commonplace in the environments in which this director chooses to make his films. The disturbing and trippy Tropical Malady includes a scene where Thai troops are seen merrily posing with a dead body. Syndromes and a Century is a soothing, radically serene look at people who work at hospitals and tend to the sick; it is worth mentioning that the film is also a kind of poetic tribute to Weerasethakul’s parents, both of whom were hospital employees.

Alas, no film in Weerasethakul’s body of work is a more probing, soul-stirring exploration of death as a new beginning than the director's masterpiece, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Inspired by the curious story of a man Weerasethakul allegedly met at a temple who would then tell of his past lives, Uncle Boonmee is, at least in part, the story of an old man named Boonmee, played with magnificent grace by actor Thanapat Saisaymar. Boonmee lives a quiet, uncomplicated life on a rural slice of land somewhere in the rural Thai countryside. As the film begins, his kidney is failing him. Boonmee is, then, preparing for his own, imminent death: in so many less words, he has accepted his fate, no matter how grim the outcome.

Even before the film takes a trip to the uncanny valley, Boonmee finds himself with what so many of us ultimately wish for in our final moments of life: he is surrounded by his family, and those who care for him. The old man is staying with his wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), a caregiver, a nephew, and an in-law, at a ramshackle farmhouse that is surrounded by the beguiling sights and sounds of the natural world. The first uncanny flourish that Weerasethakul throws our way, apart from an eerie prologue in which we glimpse one of the film’s most arrestingly otherworldly images, involves a visit from Boonmee's estranged son Boonsong (Jeerasak Kulhong), depicted here as a man-sized, bizarre-looking woodland creature with glowing red eyes. Boonsong, when first we see him, does not appear to be human. He is a kind of hybrid of man and ape, and while he can speak perfectly well, he still has those creepy, glowing red eyes that we just mentioned. This is the first, and certainly not the last instance in Uncle Boonmee where a world of drifting spirits will brush up against the world of the living – or, in this particular case, the world of those who are simply waiting to die.

Ghosts are everywhere in Uncle Boonmee. Those who have died have not ascended to heaven, nor are their corpses decomposing in the dirt. On the contrary, these lost souls haunt the lush jungle landscape that surrounds Boonmee’s homestead, taking on a variety of colorful and unexpected physical manifestations. One of Boonmee's more unforgettable moments involves a, shall we say, rather intimate encounter with a talking catfish near a waterfall. This is not the only time the filmmaker has used animals to personify spirits: in Tropical Malady, a soldier converses with tiger who is possessed by the spirit of a shaman, and even Uncle Boonmee's prologue prominently features a symbolic water buffalo.

Late in Uncle Boonmee, Boonmee and his family abscond into a vast subterranean cave that contains untold wonders. It is a transcendent interlude that actively blurs the line between the film’s overriding, ethereal tone, and full-on magical realism. Here, the borders that separate the living from the dead have no place. This cave is a land of apparitions unbound from the constraints of physical mortality. It is a land where death is, somehow, merely the next stage of life.

In many ways, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a parable not only about death, but about remembering. Our Western understanding is that death amounts to what noir mastermind Raymond Chandler once called “the big sleep." The idea is, there is nothing after death: no glory, no salvation. No one remembers you, at least not for long. Your family and loved ones are, in the end, left with nothing more than memories of when you were happy, healthy, and alive. After time, all memories fade away. Or do they?

The motif of reincarnation that runs throughout Uncle Boonmee grows more resonant when one considers that the film’s own story structure is a reflection of the fundamentally liminal nature of existence. In superficial terms, there is no “story” to speak of in Weerasethakul’s film. There are certainly no contrived, labored instances of plot manipulation, no phony instances of redemption in the eleventh hour. Boonmee simply dies, though he's lucky enough to pass on in the presence of those who loved him most. Yet, the idea that Uncle Boonmee exists as a tapestry of moments – and what is life, if not a collection of moments – means that Weerasethakul is free to ruminate on the subject of mortal expiry in a way that invites dense, detailed reading of the material.

It would be reductive and inaccurate to suggest Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a film that is exclusively concerned with what happens after we die. Like any work from this filmmaker, Uncle Boonmee touches on a number of potent themes, including but not limited to the horrors of war, the power of familial ties, and the mysticism of nature itself. Even the director's latest film, the towering Memoria (his first to star an English-language performer, Tilda Swinton) is not a film that can be reduced to a tidy, easy-to-digest thesis. These are movies about what some writers call "the big stuff." There is an arrogance in presuming that we, as human beings, know what happens when we die. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is Weerasethakul’s admittance that he both doesn't have the answers, but also is curious enough to continue searching.

By:  Ella Taylor NPR (National Public Radio)
Published: March 4, 2016

In Cemetery of Splendor, a new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an older Thai woman, Jen, is led around the grounds of a ramshackle building in provincial Thailand by an ecstatic young psychic named Keng. As they move about, we see only piles of dead leaves and old or broken statues, the detritus of a hospital that was once a school attended by the older woman, which she remembers fondly. The psychic, however, sees a former palace that, it seems, is buried beneath the building. She describes it in such opulent detail that even her somewhat skeptical companion is won over. To say nothing, we learn, of the FBI. Impressed by Keng's skill at winkling out secrets and lies, the Bureau has been after her to join the company with full benefits.

Weerasethakul raises that kind of goofy eyebrow early and often in Cemetery of Splendor, as he does in all his films. Fundamentally though, he believes in believers, especially those who, like Keng, channel subterranean layers of memory not visible to the eye. Which is why we'll also witness the long-dead cheerily materialize on a park bench to lunch and, as it were, chill with the living. And why at least one of the hospital's patients, most of whom are soldiers afflicted with a mysterious sleeping sickness, periodically wakes to exchange gossip with Jen and squire her to a cheesy horror movie at the multiplex, only to slump back into slumber without warning.

An incurable sleeping sickness yields an elusive yet expansive rumination on matters both political and intensely personal in “Cemetery of Splendor,” the latest gently hypnotic cinematic enigma from the Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While his tale of a hospital volunteer who bonds with an infected soldier emerges from the same mythic worlds explored in “Tropical Malady” (2004) and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010), the surreal visitations here occur at a more subdued, almost subterranean level; this is an eerily becalmed work in which spiritual possessions and mysterious deities come to seem virtually indistinguishable from ordinary reality. Lacking the jungle-feverish exhilaration of the filmmaker’s greatest work, but no less suffused with beauty, humor and quietly overwhelming emotion, this cryptic “Cemetery” should be readily embraced by Weerasethakul’s festival fans, but commercial prospects look pretty grave beyond the usual self-selecting arthouses.

Somewhat recalling “Syndromes and a Century” (2006) with its rural hospital setting, “Cemetery of Splendor” has an unusually clear, even concrete narrative; there are no abrupt structural divisions or elisions in evidence, and (somewhat sadly) neither are there any red-eyed Chewbaccas or cunnilingus-inclined catfish. If anything, however, that deceptively straightforward quality merely deepens the mystery; it’s the sort of film that prompts an attentive viewer to ask not “What’s going on?” so much as “What’s really going on?” As was ever the case with Weerasethakul — known to one and all as Joe, a nickname that cuts to the heart of his demanding-yet-disarming appeal — answering these questions has never been a prerequisite for appreciating the sense of magic and melancholy that emanates effortlessly from the screen.

Set in Weerasethakul’s hometown of Khonkaen, located in the northeast Thai region of Isan, the film unfolds in and around a former school that has since been converted into a small clinic for military soldiers who have fallen into a mysterious coma. Here to help take care of the men and make their slumber more comfortable is kindly volunteer Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner), who’s coping with her own physical disability; with one leg 10 centimeters shorter than the other, she’s forced to get around on crutches. Jenjira watches with particular care over a handsome soldier named Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), whom she starts to feel as though she’s “synchronizing” with. The bond seems to be mutual: Itt happens to revive just as Jenjira is bathing him, in a moment of understated sensuality that’s perfectly in keeping with Weerasethakul’s earthy, bawdy sensibility. (Also on offer here: some discreet woodland defecation and an erection sight gag even your mother could love.)

Consciousness comes and goes easily for these traumatized narcoleptics — we see one of them suddenly drop off again mid-meal — but Itt seems to spend most of his waking moments with Jenjira. She in turn lights a candle for him at a local Buddhist shrine with her significant other, Richard (Richard Abramson), an American who’s recently relocated to Thailand to be with her. The two goddess statues gracing that shrine will later take on human form and appear to Jenjira in broad daylight (played by actresses Sjittraporn Wongsrikeaw and Bhattaratorn Skenraigul), in the sort of delightfully matter-of-fact revelation that requires no visual effects to leave you feeling thoroughly enchanted.

A similarly lo-fi bit of sorcery is introduced with the character of Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a young medium who has the ability to read the men’s thoughts and memories in their sleep and communicates them to their loved ones. She offers to serve as a sort of psychological conduit for Itt and Jenjira, and much of the second half of “Cemetery of Splendor” is devoted to a lengthy conversation between Jenjira and Keng-as-Itt, their transmigration of souls culminating with an intimate gesture of physical and emotional healing that is as grotesque as it is undeniably affecting.

Few filmmakers this side of David Lynch are as adept or intuitive as Apichatpong Weerasethakul when it comes to appropriating the language of dreams, which makes it somewhat surprising that “Cemetery of Splendor,” a movie explicitly concerned with sleeping and dreaming, remains firmly embedded in what seems to be a continually waking reality. Those desiring a headlong plunge into the untamed natural world that is Weerasethakul’s sweet spot may feel a bit bereft: With the exception of one baffling, brain-tickling image of an amoeba slowly crawling its way across a cloudy sky, the picture seems inclined not to transport us into a bizarre parallel reality, but rather to frame its environment for us in ways that are inherently strange and beguiling. We often return to the clinic at night, when the soldiers are undergoing an experimental treatment using lights that continually change color; the effect, which suggests a gathering of giant, glow-in-the-dark candy canes, is utterly transfixing.

According to the film’s production notes, its premise was inspired by a strange outbreak that required 40 soldiers to be quarantined at a northern Thai hospital. That incident occurred about three years ago, roughly coinciding with the country’s latest wave of political turmoil, and it’s no huge leap to interpret the sleeping soldiers as a stand-in for a government paralyzed by protests, coups and other outbreaks of violence. When it’s revealed that the school/hospital is resting on a burial ground for past kings of Thailand, whose ongoing spiritual battle is directly tied to the soldiers’ dormant state, it feels like nothing less than a lament for a nation whose internal strife dates back centuries.

All of which runs the risk of reducing “Cemetery of Splendor” to a bare-bones political allegory and disregarding its wondrously personal elements. We are even more firmly on Weerasethakul’s home turf than usual, and in one sense, the film is about nothing more (or less) profound than the sights and sounds of his childhood, whether it’s a field where kids play ball in the distance while a bulldozer rips into the earth; a busy night market where Itt and Jenjira munch on local delicacies; or a local multiplex showing some delirious-looking Thai schlockfest of a sort that perhaps inspired Weerasethakul to embark on his own (admittedly very different) filmmaking career. But beyond these snippets of memory, the film is lovingly grounded in the rhythms of its two leads’ growing rapport, and it draws tremendous warmth and feeling from the performance of Pongpas Widner (who has worked with the director since 2002’s “Blissfully Yours”), who, amid all these layers of topical subtext and semi-autobiographical storytelling, succeeds in making the film very much her character’s story.

As ever, the unhurried pacing will strike the uninitiated as simply too somnambulant by half; a line of dialogue like “Don’t fall asleep yet, please” may seem an invitation to do just that. Yet while “Cemetery of Splendor” is unabashedly a work of slow cinema, the oft-hurled pejorative of “difficult” seems a particularly poor fit for a film whose unforced lyricism could scarcely be more graceful or inviting. The crystalline images, lensed by Diego Garcia (taking over for the director’s usual d.p., Sayombhu Mukdeeprom), are carefully but never rigidly composed, positioning us in easy proximity to the characters while still offering pictorially ravishing views of Khonkaen’s lush natural scenery. Lee Chatametikool’s steady cutting maintains rhythm and flow, never devolving into a long-take endurance test, and Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr’s sound design, while less overpoweringly atmospheric than usual, deepens our sense of immersion.

By:  Gabriel Winslow-Yost, New York Review of Books

Published: March 13, 2016

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Cemetery of Splendor, the most nakedly political film of Weerasethakul’s career, is a gentle, open-hearted story of human connection, underlain at every moment by rage and dread.

When Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Cemetery of Splendor was introduced at the New York Film Festival last fall, a statement from him was read in which he described it as being set in a country that has gone “from less democracy to no democracy.” (He also said that he didn’t mind if the audience fell asleep, and wished them pleasant dreams if they did—a joke that seemed darker and darker as the film unfolded.) The film—which has just been released in New York and elsewhere—takes place in and around a ramshackle clinic in northeastern Thailand, set up to house a group of Thai soldiers who have fallen mysteriously and, it seems, permanently asleep. Jen (played by Weerasethakul regular Jenjira Pongpas), a middle-aged volunteer nurse with a crippled leg, becomes attached to Itt, one of the soldiers, who has no family nearby to care for him. Eventually Itt and a few of the others manage to waken, intermittently and temporarily, and he and Jen strike up a friendship, half romantic, half maternal.

Weerasethakul’s version of cinematic protest is passionate but oblique. What is ailing the soldiers is revealed before too long: in what seems a bizarre literalization of Stephen Dedalus’s quip that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” it turns out that ancient kings, who once lived, warred with one another, and died in this area, have commandeered the life-force of soldiers, and are using them to continue their endless war in the invisible realm of the spirits. The symbolism of his central conceit—patriotic Thais struggling unsuccessfully to wake up, vampiric autocrats sucking the life out of their subjects—is clear enough, though the film itself treats it so concretely, and with such patient attention, that it’s easy to forget. The boogeyman lurking just outside the frame is the Thai government, a military dictatorship since the May 2014 coup and none-too-tolerant before that. “I see no future in being a soldier,” says Itt, in one of his interludes of consciousness; he’d rather be a baker. But it isn’t up to him, and soon after he says this, he falls back asleep.

Weerasethakul is certainly an unlikely political filmmaker. Though only forty-five, he has been Thailand’s most acclaimed director for over a decade. His earlier works were driven by more intimate matters: a pervasive romantic desire, a good-natured amusement at the vagaries of the human body, a sense of the world as alive, interconnected, and constantly changing. It is true that one of his films, Syndromes and a Century (2006), was subject to harsh government censorship, but this was an almost comical overreaction: the objectionable scenes included one in which a Buddhist monk plays an acoustic guitar, and another in which some doctors share a drink in an empty hospital room. (Weerasethakul at first refused to alter the film for Thai release, then eventually screened an ostentatiously butchered version in which the deleted sections were replaced with long stretches of black film; audience members were directed to YouTube to see what they had missed.)

His films are delivered with a kind of mystic deadpan. No matter what is happening onscreen—from a dental appointment to the sudden appearance of a dying man’s dead wife at the supper table—his camera never wavers, his long, slow takes never speed up, no one screams, no music swells. There is no distinction between the mundane and the supernatural, and Weerasethakul never fixes on a single tone or meaning, always holding a bit of mystery in reserve.

By:  Ed Gonzalez

Published: September 30, 2004 

Both love story and folk tale, Tropical Malady intersects eros with cultural traditions.

There’s a scene in David O. Russell’s intermittingly brilliant I Heart Huckabees where Dustin Hoffman’s “existential detective” likens a bed sheet to the tissue that connects the world around us. In Tropical Malady, writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul more successfully evokes an existential fiber between sexual desire and cultural mythos in the pastoral jungle outside of a Thai village when a young soldier, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), falls in love with a country boy, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee).

Weerasethakul’s metaphysical fascination with ordinary human gestures and the shape of everyday objects colors Keng and Tong’s bittersweet courtship. Keng gives Tong a tape of music by the Clash but forgets to give him his heart, and when Keng attempts to transplant his love for Tong via a simple gesticulation of his arm, the transfusion of Keng’s cosmic-romantic energy is ravishingly felt in the director’s enchanted compositions. But if Tropical Malady begins as a simple love story, it turns into something more profound when Keng enters the jungle in pursuit of a creature allegedly responsible for killing Tong’s mother’s livestock.

Because Weerasethakul equates Keng and Tong’s suffocating love for one another to a twisted landscape of trees, Tropical Malady could just as easily have been called Unbearably Yours. A glorious mood piece, the film mirrors the yin of Keng’s pursuit of Tong throughout the first half of the film to the yang of Keng’s spiritual journey through the second half. Though the film’s two parts seem as if they could work independently of one another, the first half clearly anticipates the second, or, more precisely, the second half seems to reimagine the more conventional first part as a primitive tribal dance. Both parts seem to tell the same story—only one says it with considerably less words.

Keng’s love for Tong borders on unrequited: When Keng smells Tong’s hand after Tong urinates on the side of the road, he returns the erotic sentiment by aggressively licking Keng’s hand. Earlier, Keng grabs Tong’s leg during an incredibly erotic scene in a movie theater, to which an excited Tong responds by trapping Keng’s hand between his thighs and grabbing his shoulders with his arm. The twisting arms and legs anticipate the tangle of trees that similarly bind them during the film’s second half. Both love story and folk tale, 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.

By:  Peter Bradshaw

Published: Thursday, March 3, 2005

There is a sort of film - a rare sort - that has you leaving the cinema in a light-headed daze, pointing back at the exit and asking the person you're with: "What just happened in there?" Such a one is this beautiful and strange Thai movie from director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose last film Blissfully Yours, about a Burmese immigrant and his Thai girlfriend was a little more conventional. Certainly it couldn't prepare us for the demi-fantasy mescaline headtrip that is Tropical Malady. Just thinking about it now makes me want to burst out laughing at its sheer audacity, its eccentricity, its unashamed aspiration to poetry and its nimble evasion of anything so commonplace as an explanation.

A prizewinner at Cannes last year, Variety magazine none the less dismissively claimed that it induced "maladies in most critics who saw it". Not with me it didn't. I thought then, and think now, that it's the most daring movie around: a film that deserves to be thronged with open-minded cinema-lovers on the lookout for something that doesn't just shuffle the same old dog-eared pack of cliches.

Weerasethakul begins non-commitally, non-judgmentally, with a bunch of Thai army reservists in uniform in the northern forests, crowding for a group photo while one of their number readies his digital camera. What they are heartlessly gathering around is a civilian's dead body recovered from the undergrowth: the tableau calls to mind not so much Iraq as a safari portrait from an earlier age. The dead civilian has been mauled, it seems, by a tiger, or perhaps by a forest spirit that persistent myth and legend insist is out there in the terrifying darkness.

This disquieting motif segues into what appears to be a love story between one of the soldiers, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) and a country boy Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). The moviemaking style does not coerce or emphasise this narrative direction in any way: Keng and Tong's gentle, shy love affair is allowed to flower almost in real time in scenes which play themselves out with the most unhurried naturalism.

Then something very weird happens, a quantum leap of weird, a warp-factor 10 acceleration into weirdness. The screen goes blank for too long to be entirely comfortable and then brightens again with something quite new. We have effectively begun the movie again with a visionary retelling of the shaman legend of the forest, with Keng hunting the shape-shifting tiger-shadow who is, in point of fact, his boyfriend Tong.

His sweet, bashful lover is the tiger-spirit, able to morph into the figure of a man or a beast. Keng's tracking of the Tong/tiger lasts for about an hour of screen time in this second part of the movie, in almost complete silence, except for the jungle-throb and for one extraordinary scene when Keng is confronted with a tree-monkey, whose chatterings are "translated" in subtitles. The monkey is telling him: "The tiger tracks you like a shadow; you are his prey and his companion." This bizarre simian cameo is topped only by the final encounter with the tiger which has a hallucinatory, transcendent beauty.

When Martin Sheen's Captain Willard runs into his tiger in Apocalypse Now and just about escapes, he stammers to himself in a panic: "Never get out of the boat - absolutely goddam right." But there's no boat here, no refuge, but also, intriguingly, no clear sense that refuge is needed. Is the forest hostile, or neutral? Is the tiger, in the monkey's words, prey or companion? The natural, universal business of feeding and eating, hunting and being hunted, sexual contact and sexual conquest: is it a dark and unending imposition of power or just the way things are, something to be accepted?

These are some of the questions that may or may not be of use in trying to understand this baffling, fascinating film. In formal, aesthetic terms, the second half may offer a visionary Jungian gloss on what precedes it, or it may be that it's the first half which is a commentary on the second. It's a mystery. But the pleasure of this outlandish film does not depend on solving it.

The cinema is so dominated by conventional narrative that anything which dares to venture outside the form and the norm, and use the medium's vast unused potential, risks being scorned. Peter Greenaway says that cinema has still to emerge from its own theatrically hidebound 19th century. Whether or not he's right, there can hardly be a film right now which challenges the conventions so playfully and seductively as Tropical Malady. It may turn out to be a masterpiece or simply a cult classic or just barking mad. Either way, it's sumptuous and scary, and a brilliant adventure in structure and style. Show me someone who doesn't thrill to the jaw-dropping strangeness of that final meeting with the tiger, and I will show you someone with a hunk of MDF where their heart should be.

By:  Tash Aw

Published: November 13, 2019

The Hypnotic Threat of Apichatpong’s “Tropical Malady”

In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

The story of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) seems simple enough at the outset: a handsome soldier stationed in a rural community on the edge of the forest in northern Thailand meets a young village man. Their lives are by and large carefree, filled with an innocence that feels entirely fitting with the peace and splendor of the countryside around them—the tawny deciduous jungle punctuated with lakes and rolling grassland, the mountains that stretch to Laos and Myanmar in the distance. They listen to pop music, stroll around the night market in the small local town, visit cave temples, spend quiet afternoons sheltering from rainstorms in a sala overlooking a tranquil pond. They fall in love.

Though they never manage to articulate their emotions, we are left in little doubt as to how they feel about each other after an hour of slow-burn desire, during which Tong, the younger, more inexperienced of the two, begins to figure out that this new relationship is not quite the laddish one he expected it to be. Keng, the soldier, is much more direct, familiar with same-sex relationships and comfortable in his queer masculine identity. (In one of their outings to the local town, he flashes a knowing smile at the buff aerobics instructor conducting public classes in the main square, a brief half-second that carries the weight of a whole history of off-camera, off-script liaisons.) But even as he courts Tong in an almost old-fashioned, mostly nonsexual manner, it’s clear that he has never before been in such a position of vulnerability. His longing for Tong is new and unknown. At the end of one long dreamy evening together, they finally express their physical desire by kissing each other’s hands—in fact not just kissing but licking, gnawing, each almost eating the other man’s fist. As Keng rides home, the night seems magical and unending, filled with color and music.

And then, the night is over.

In the long static daytime scene that follows, we are left to figure out who is sleeping on a small bed in a sparsely decorated room in a village house. It looks like Tong, but it’s impossible to say for sure. And then the bed is empty. The young man or teenage boy is gone, and now a soldier is in the room, examining the objects in the room in a forensic manner. He looks at photographs, poring over banal snapshots of the boy’s life. It looks like Tong in the photos, and the soldier looks like Keng, but are they the same people we have come to know? The whole tone feels slightly different—we don’t know where we are, or how the current situation is linked to the blossoming love story of the two men. What has happened to them?

When I was growing up in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, my childhood imagination was filled with tales of the jungle. Both my parents came from families anchored in rural Malaysia and were adults before they left to find work in the city. My father’s side of the family lived in particularly remote towns in the extreme northeast of the country, and whenever we met with them they told us of life in the forest—their daily struggles, both current and historic, the harshness of life in an inhospitable landscape, and also, from time to time, the terrifying and hypnotic accounts of ghosts and legends that form the core of Southeast Asian folklore: wild beasts, real and imagined, that roamed the jungle, devouring pets and snatching small children from their parents; the spirits of women who died in pregnancy, known as pontianak, that came back to haunt (mostly male) travelers on lonely roads; shape-shifting shamans possessed by the souls of animals. Always, for me at least, these stories circled back to a single figure of fascination and fear: the tiger.

I spent my school holidays living with relatives in a small town on the edge of the jungle, and each time I went, I was filled with a mixture of familiarity and alienation. The rhythms of the family—our daily routine; our shared language, culture, and ambitions—were so much a part of my thinking that I slipped easily into rural life, even though it was so different from mine in the suburbs. But part of me never felt comfortable with the proximity to nature, which seemed perpetually threatening and even destructive. Years later, when I first traveled to Europe as an adult, I was amazed to find that people actually aspired to live in the countryside—a place of gentle, rustic pleasures, landscapes that seemed to my Southeast Asian eye extremely manicured, with hedgerows and grass verges politely demarcating the boundaries of ownership, between humans and nature. Even now, each time I find myself on a walk through tranquil northern pine forests, I can’t help but think of Asian jungles, and how they are full of things that could kill you.

One of the myths that most troubled me as a child was the legend of the were-tiger, known in Malay as harimau jadian. Of all the human/animal combinations possible, a tiger inhabiting a human’s body seemed the most dangerous, the one capable of causing the greatest havoc. Perhaps it was the cunning and strength of the tiger allied to the intelligence and vanity of humans—whatever the reason, I wasn’t the only one who feared this. I soon learned that versions of the were-tiger existed in every culture in Southeast Asia. Maybe, I thought, it was because the two were so similar. All that was beautiful in ourselves we saw mirrored in tigers. And so, too, all that was destructive.

It turns out that the soldier in the second part of Tropical Malady is tracking a tiger. Villagers have reported missing livestock and now a young man has disappeared, presumed to have been taken by the tiger roaming the surrounding forest. But as the soldier tracks the tiger deeper into the jungle and starts to succumb to exhaustion, the power of traditional mythology—folktales of tiger spirits and shape-shifters—begins to take hold of his imagination. He hears strange noises, the calls of unfamiliar animals that seem oddly human; the dense forest moves in ways that suggest it is taking on a life of its own; he becomes acutely aware of every movement of every branch. He runs out of food and resorts to trapping catfish and digging snails from the mud. He sees a naked man in a clearing, but the man is behaving like a tiger, rubbing himself on some trees as if to mark his territory with scent before loping away with an awkward gait that is neither human nor animal. The soldier thinks he must be hallucinating; we think he must be hallucinating. The man-tiger confronts and attacks him, but later we see the man-tiger wandering through the woods, sobbing; it, too, seems lost. As the inner worlds of both man and man-tiger draw closer together in their shared desperation, the world of the forest becomes dreamy and ghostlike, filled with monkeys that seem on the verge of speech and spirits that rise from dead cows—ideas of the circularity of life that Apichatpong would push to greater extremes in his Palme d’Or–winning Uncle Boonmee six years later.

In the ravishing closing scene, the soldier, on his knees from exhaustion and beginning to behave in strangely animal ways, comes face to face with the man-tiger, now in majestic, fully animal form, standing on the branch of a tree and staring straight at him. It doesn’t move but he hears its voice. The original title of the film is Satpralat, which means, literally, “monster,” and the tiger uses this name to address the soldier in a voice that is at once tender and overwhelming, that renders the human powerless.

“Once I’ve devoured your soul,” it says softly, “we are neither animal nor human. Stop breathing. I miss you, soldier.” We wait, expecting the tiger to devour the soldier, but there is no need, they are one and the same. We remember Tong and Keng, we think of how they felt when we last saw them together. All of a sudden we realize how they must have felt, because we feel it now too: love is dangerous, love will consume us; we are powerless before our desire.

It is at this point in the film, when time seems suspended and I always find myself holding my breath, that all the previous images come rushing back: the gritty nature of life in these country communities, the ice-cutting and cement factories the people work in, the games of soccer and takraw they play on rough dirt fields—the kind of existence I knew so well from those days spent with my relatives on the jungle’s edge. Maybe Apichatpong’s tiger feels so intense and real because it speaks to our desire to break free from all that we know about family and society, about ourselves, even, and seek something—like love—that sets us free, no matter how dangerous it might be.