Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul has some fervent admirers and is the only Thai movie director who has registered on the international cinema radar.* I thought his 2000 movie Mysterious Object at Noon quite opaque, though there were some scenes in it that were interesting. I have not seen "Blissfully Yours" (2002) or "The Adventures of Iron Pussy" (2003, a story about a transvestite secret agent is sent on a mission to the Thai countryside).

Despite being more bewildered than enlightened or entertained by "Mysterious Object at Noon," I have been curious about his "Sud pralad" (which means "strange animal" in Thai, with the connotation of a dangerous one, but the English titles is"Tropical Malady") ever since it won the jury prize at the 2004 Cannes festival (a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino). It has become something of a cult film both in Thailand and among foreign fans of Asian cinema(s). It has finally made it into limited US release. I can safely predict that it is not going to be a crossover hit, though its production values are significantly higher than those of "Mysterious Object at Noon."

The movie is a diptych split in the middle between two stories about a Thai soldier, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) serving in jungles in northeastern Thailand (Issan). In the first, he has a tentative romance (without any genital sex) with Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) a recently demobilized soldier who works in an ice manufacturing plant. There are indications that both of them have some familiarity with same-sex sexual relations, but their amour (or whatever it is) proceeds very slowly. It includes going with an older woman (Tong' mother?) into a Buddhist cave temple (where "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" incongruously tinkles) and starting through a tunnel until Tong turns back. After some kinky hand-licking, Tong goes off into the forest.

The screen goes dark as if the projector has broken down and then the second part begins with narration about a Khmer (Cambodian) shaman who could take the guise of animal familiars. Keng is then told of a large tiger that has been taking livestock and terrifying the village by where he is posted. The very tense second part of the movie has him tracking the tiger. Weerasethakul lays by Dogme 95 rules in not using any music and little light. The jungle at night is quite dark.

I'm not sure if Tong is supposed to have disappeared into the jungle at the end of part one and become the tiger, or whether the second part is a variation on the aim-inhibited longings of the first part. (I'm told that the corpse that the army patrol finds at the very beginning of the movie and which is never explained is left over from the end of "Blissfully Yours". The first half strikes me in some ways as a rural version of "In the Mood for Love" with Thai pop songs in place of Nat King Cole) Tong does not strike me as tiger-like. If anything, Keng is more aggressive, though well short of being predatory.

Whether the second part is a continuation or a variation on the first part, the tiger is a naked Sakda Kaewbuadee with stripes painted on, slipping through the forest. Eventually, a monkey (a baboon?) tells Keng that he should either kill the beast and release its spirit or allow himself to be devoured and join the lonely spirit. This presumably makes more sense to Thais (both audiences and Keng)..

And the "tropical malady"? I'm not sure. Lovesickness is not uniquely tropical. Besides, the Thai title clearly refers to the man-tiger.

The first part would strike most American audiences as too slow and too inconclusive, the second part as too underlit and mysterious. I was surprised at how suspenseful the second part was (in the low-budget, no-gore suspense tradition of Jacques Tourneur, especially "Cat People"), even if the monkey reminded me of an owl in some Walt Disney movie or another. BTW, only one patron walked out (very close to the end) of the screening I saw, but it was in an art-house theater, where the audience is accustomed to subtitles and strangeness (other than the monkey, there is practically no speech to translate in the second part and the songs in the first part are not translated).

A PAL-system DVD has been available for some time in Asia, but the movie is not on Region 1 DVD. Rather, it is in theaters.

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* The nickname of "Joe" comes from his three years of film school in Chicago. Weerasethakul grew up in Issan and likes to wander around the country with a hand-held camera. In an interview I read (in the Bay Area Reporter, he said that he preferred not to work with professional Thai actors for three reasons: (1) "they are less expensive, (2) "they can give me more time than most professional cators, and (3) "they are fresh and do not stick to a style of acting [very broadly] that comes fvrom Thai televsion. I can get them to absorb my kind of acting more easily than professional actors" (he parodied the exaggerated style in ""The Adventures of Iron Pussy").


Recommended:
No