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Review

The primary experiment of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s vaguely narrative third feature is its bisection. Tropical Malady, which begins as a lovely, pastoral, freeform love story between Tong (a young peasant boy) and Keng (a soldier), is sharply severed midway through. It appears as if the film has run out of the projector. Then, without warning, the film begins again with a new credits sequence. Tong’s character is reconceived as a shape-shifting shaman and Keng is the hunter who pursues the shaman once he takes the form of a tiger that threatens the jungle.

Such an avant-garde conceit could only be the work of a director intent on restructuring the way an audience responds to the division of time in a film (to say nothing of his division of concrete and abstract realities). Unfortunately, the response he will get from most audience members (especially those who have become all too comfortable with American three-act structure) is bafflement. That said, if one watches Tropical Malady not as a film, but rather as a work of poetry or visual art, he will surely consider it one of the boldest and most delightful films of the year. In fact, I cannot think of a film that Tropical Malady recalls. It seems, rather, to invoke the spirit of a Rothko painting or the imagist poets H.D. and Marianne Moore.

But what does the film mean? How do its two halves relate to each other? Chronologically, the second seems to logically follow the first. Thematically, however, one belongs not after the other, but rather beneath it. It is film with both conscious and subconscious. The latter half (re-titled "A Spirit’s Path") provides a dense environment informed by cultural mythology, natural law, and spiritual instincts. The former provides a context for and application of those abstractions—namely a series of minute and trivial daily tasks. That said, however you interpret the film, one thing is sure: this is the type of cinema that speaks not only to the intellect or the emotions, but to that intangible realm of human experience—what we understand without fully understanding. For that reason, and for its heaps of pure imagination, Tropical Malady begs repeat viewings. Come for the realist eroticism, stay for the talking baboon.(Thai with English subtitles)

 -- Mark Thiedeman