"Tropical Malady"

This love story about a soldier and a country boy from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes you feel as if life itself is unfolding on the screen.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 1, 2004 | If we're honest, most of us would admit that our spirits sink when we hear a movie described as "pastoral." Too often the term has been used to signify pictures that are lovely, composed and becalmed to the point of deadness. This year's "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and ..." is the perfect example of this sort of movie, the kind that takes about five minutes to make you wonder how you're going to get through the next two hours.

The two fictional features of 34-year-old Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul -- the 2002 "Blissfully Yours," just beginning to be released theatrically here, and the new "Tropical Malady," which is in the New York Film Festival and opens in theaters next year -- are certainly pastoral. Each film starts out in Bangkok before moving into the Thai forests, and once they get there, they progress at the speed of nature.

And there's never a moment when what's on-screen doesn't feel alive in the way that the woods do when you're walking through them. Apichatpong's depiction of nature -- idyllic in "Blissfully Yours"; dense, dreamlike and forbidding in "Tropical Malady" -- is charged and erotic.

One of the truest sensualists to emerge in movies in recent years, Apichatpong makes you feel as if life itself is unfolding on the screen. He does it mostly just by allowing his characters to bask in their rural surroundings. When the lovers in "Blissfully Yours" lie in the sun, the camera stays on them to give us the feeling of sun-drenched contentment. We're aware of details like the beads of sweat just visible at the girl's hairline and the repeating patterns of the bird calls high above them. The effect may seem anti-dramatic, because events are not heightened or "edited"; but Apichatpong gives us the ability to live in each moment with the people on-screen, and at moments it feels indefinably precious.

Of his two fiction features (his first feature, the 2000 "Mysterious Object at Noon," is an impressionistic documentary), "Blissfully Yours" is the more accessible and, I think, the better film. It opens in a way that makes you think the projectionist has screwed up the reels: with no titles, right in the midst of a scene. We watch as a young man with a strange skin disease, his factory-worker girlfriend and an older woman who is their acquaintance (and perhaps more) consult a doctor, do their marketing, visit the woman's husband at his place of work. We pick up information about these three and the way they are connected in scattered bits and pieces. The overall effect is static: There's no music, and the film comprises long takes in which the camera doesn't move.

The young girl, Roong, lies to her boss to get the afternoon off, and she and the young man, Min, take off for a day trip into the country. Only then, 45 minutes into the movie, do the opening credits come on as the soundtrack fills with a Thai pop cover of an Astrud Gilberto song. Suddenly everything that had seemed prosaic and dreary is transformed with the promise of freedom, even if that freedom is limited to an afternoon of playing hooky. It's as if Apichatpong is saying, now that our deadening routine is finished, the movie -- and thus pleasure -- can begin.

The hour and 20 minutes that follow are Eden. We watch Roong and Min enter into a secluded grotto where they don't do much more than laze in the sun, nibble at their picnic, make love, doze. Apichatpong communicates a feeling of peace and contentment with shots as simple as the lovers caressing each other's feet beneath the waters of a running stream. As an expression of the fragility of perfect moments, this is the closest movies may ever get to Manet's painting "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe."

Next Page: "Tropical Malady" also leaves the quotidian world behind -- and plunges into pure fable

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