Tropical Malady (2004)

image courtesy of mubi.com

My only prior experience with Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a single viewing of Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - an all-timer of a title - which I didn’t understand at all. So I came in expecting something equally surreal and impenetrable. It isn’t, exactly, but it is split into two entirely different films that may or may not be thematically linked, depending on how you look at it. The first half is a surprisingly sweet romance between two men, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) and Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee). It’s remarkably conventional: they sit and talk, eat together, visit a cave, rescue a sick dog, go to the movies. Then Tong simply walks away - literally. Like, into the dark. The second half follows a soldier (Lomnoi) deep in the jungle, hunting a tiger shaman. He speaks with a monkey, accidentally kills a cow, and comes face to face with the shaman in both tiger and human form (Kaewbuadee). The film is a diptych and invites us to find the connective tissue. My favorite reading is that the romance functions as its own kind of mythology - something that exists alongside the legends and folk stories of the culture, which the second half embodies. Every love story, the film seems to argue, can be just as mystical and surreal as the fantastical tales passed down through generations. By placing both halves on equal footing, Weerasethakul refuses to let one explain or diminish the other. It’s a bold structural choice that mostly works. The first half is genuinely charming in a way I didn’t expect, and the second is hypnotic if occasionally frustrating. I’m not sure I fully grasped it, but it got my brain moving, and I would argue that’s the whole point.

3.5 ot of 5 Stars