Two by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

As far as the arthouse circuit is concerned, right now the biggest name in Thai cinema is a director named Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who everyone calls Joe, so I will too. After watching his 2010 Palme d'Or winner, "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," I really didn't know what to make of him, but I was very impressed by his filmmaking. So I've seen two more of his films, "Tropical Malady" and "Syndromes and a Century," and would like to put down a few thoughts on them here.

"Tropical Malady" starts as a homosexual romance between a soldier named Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) and a man he meets by chance in the city, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). The first half of the film is a pleasant journey through their courtship, taking place mostly around the city's nightlife and in a few quiet pastoral interludes in the countryside. It's a wonderfully immersive experience, giving us a look into the characters' most intimate moments together. You get a feel for the steady pace of their lives, and the little ins and outs of the world around them. There's a brief section where Keng is working in an ice factory that is totally incidental, but oddly fascinating.

And then comes the second half of the story, which may be a continuation of the first, or may be completely unconnected. Now we follow a soldier, played by Banlop Lomnoi, who goes into the darkness of the jungle to hunt a tiger shaman, played by Sakda Kaewbuadee. Where the first half of the film was entirely realistic, except for a few exchanges obliquely referencing the supernatural, now we are in a realm of magic. The tiger shaman can take on human form. The soldier converses with a helpful monkey, and then has an encounter with the ghost of a cow. I'm still trying to figure out what it all means.

One of the defining features of Joe's work seems to be his juxtaposition of the fantastic and mystical with the everyday world. The past lives of the characters affect their present day lives, and the spirits are ever-present, even they're only in the background. I enjoyed "Tropical Malady" for its first half, but the second left me puzzling over what the director's intentions where. Was it a metaphor for the relationship? Was it an illustration of the two men in their past lives? Was this one of those cases where knowing more about the culture of Thailand would have helped?

"Syndromes and Century," however, was much more accessible, though in its own way just as much in need of interpretation. Again, there are two stories, each occupying half of the total narrative. We meet various doctors and patients in a hospital in the 1960s. One man has come for an interview. A group of monks have come for medical examinations. A male and female pair of colleagues consider their romantic relationship. The interactions are ordinary, incidental, and there is no larger story that encompasses these individual characters, except that they all happen in and around the hospital.

Then the second half of the film begins, and for a moment it seems like we've started over from the beginning. We see a man in an interview. Monks have come for medical examinations. The dialogue and the characters are essentially the same as from the beginning of the film, but something has fundamentally changed. The hospital is more modern, and the presence of civilization has expanded greatly, supplanting the natural world. It is forty years later and you can see a shift has taken place. The characters may be the same, but their behaviors and the world around them are different, so the outcomes of their stories are different.

So much is conveyed through art design and cinematography. Joe's filmmaking looks so simple at first, full of neatly composed long shots that allow us to take in the various environments and the places of the characters within them. It's only when the film jumps forty years into the future that you realize all the little ways that Joe managed to include shots of greenery in the film, and the constant nature sounds on the soundtrack. In the modern environment, the crickets and the rustling trees have largely been replaced with the din of traffic, and the greenery is far more constrained. The interiors of the hospital are more monolithic and cold.

And then you look at the way that the monks behave, and the way that the couple interact with each other. Sometimes it's just little things, like the coldness of one exchange that was previously far friendlier. The modern hospital is much bigger, and at one point the monks are almost lost to swarm of other people in the corridor. However, there are no value judgments in play here. The director does not prefer one version of events to another, and there are good and bad sides about life in each. Though the film poses many questions, I think the fundamental thing is to see and appreciate the difference.

And that's enough.
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