Tropical Malady

The best part about watching Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady is watching the audience. The film is cleaved into two perfect parts, both love stories in their own ways. The first half of the film chronicles the romance between two men, steeped in transcendental Weerasethakulisms where hearing and seeing aren't the only senses evoked: you can feel the dew dripping off leaves in muggy forests that engulf the frame and smell the tar suspended in smoggy city air. Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), a soldier whose unit is investigating the strange killings of cattle in the countryside, meets Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), an ex-soldier living with his family. Were Tropical Malady made by any other director, a traditional gay love story would follow: they'd grow closer, someone would make the first move, Tong would tell his disapproving parents, et cetera. But that's boring, and Weerasethakul knows it. Instead, we see snapshots of their courtship, intricately constructed tableaus of important moments with little-to-no dialogue because their connection transcends language. A recurring shot in Tropical Malady is Tong or Keng looking slightly off-screen, their eyes laden with such affection that you don't need to be shown who's on the other side of the gaze—you can already tell. In a scene where Tong is at a vet awaiting his dog's test results, he sits beside Keng, their legs knocking together delicately, and when one man's knee drifts, the other's follows. The sweetness between them is never cloying or mawkish; when Keng tells Tong he wants to give him his heart, you can tell the poetics aren't the point—it's the simplest way he can say how he feels.

The second half feels like a total departure from the first: it's almost an hour of a soldier silently stalking through jungle thicket, trailing the ghost of a shaman trapped in the body of a tiger. In the first half, the antsy viewer's endurance through long, unbroken shots of characters walking through nature was rewarded with plot; in this half, long, unbroken shots of nature are the respite. It is, frankly, boring, but that's the point. Like other entries into the unfairly maligned slow cinema genre, a typical plot isn't what the filmmaker is after, it's mood. The padding shots of the soldier through gaps in trees or across fields forge a creeping sense of dread that couldn't be built any other way. The denouement of this half—where the soldier witnesses a cow's spirit rise from its corpse, sees a glowing tree that makes walkie-talkie noises, and subsequently decides to have his soul devoured so he can join the spirit world—is only made possible by the plodding mundanity it lives in for tens of minutes beforehand. At this moment in the theater, you'll notice people who were drifting off to sleep suddenly lean forward, rapt by the sonic and visual landscape on their screen. There's something familiar and involuntary in the emotions that a Weerasethakul film evokes, like a hypnic jerk. Part of the fun is noticing this metaphysical sensation take hold of others in a darkened room.