Firstly, even when the Cannes jury gets it wrong it generally does so for reasons that are quite interesting. For example, when the 2004 Jury chaired by Quentin Tarantino looked past such fantastic films as Olivier Assayas’s Clean, Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, Lucrecia Martel’s La Nina Santa, Paolo Sorrentino’s Le Conseguenze dell’Amore, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sud Pralad in order to award the Palme to Michael Moore’s baggy, manipulative and self-indulgent political documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, people generally saw it as an entirely justifiable decision to channel the media interest generated by Cannes into an assault on the Bush regime and its dubious foreign policy.

Secondly, despite the medium of film being grotesquely over-represented in mainstream media, Cannes is really the only time when entertainment reporters focus their attentions solely on the world of art house film. Only too aware that this might be the only chance they get to push these films at a mainstream audience, film critics generally choose to downplay controversy and negativity in favour of celebrating the positive and so raising the mainstream profile of art house film.

Thirdly, unlike most awards that are given out retroactively to works released within a particular timeframe, the Palme d’Or is only awarded to films that are officially in competition at Cannes. What makes the competition so peculiar is that many of the films that are in competition at Cannes also premier at Cannes meaning that unless you happen to be in Cannes during the festival, chances are that you will not get to see any of the competing films until they are picked up for distribution. This quirk of administration means that anyone not at Cannes is effectively excluded from the conversation. Furthermore, the Cannes film festival only lasts about ten days meaning that most critics struggle to see all of the films in competition. Taken together, these two sets of considerations ensure that, come the end of the Cannes festival and the announcement of the Palme d’Or winner, almost nobody in the world has seen enough of the shortlist to be able to criticise the jury’s selection in any meaningful way.

These three barriers to criticism effectively ensure that all press coverage devoted to the Palme d’Or is either a series of uplifting platitudes about the wonders of art house film or objective and dispassionate reportage that a group of people watched a group of films and determined one film in particular to be better than the others. By and large, this media love-in works quite well as the increased visibility generated by Cannes and the Palme d’Or not only creates an international market for decidedly non-commercial films, it also provides producers with an opportunity to find people to distribute their films and thereby satisfy said international market. Unfortunately, it is precisely because Cannes plays this key role in determining which films achieve wider cinematic distribution that its selections must be scrutinised and its juries held to account.

Let us consider the films that were in competition this year:

• Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson
• Rust and Bone by Jacques Audiard
• Holy Motors by Leos Carax
• Cosmopolis by David Cronenberg
• The Paperboy by Lee Daniels
• Killing Them Softly by Andrew Dominik
• Reality by Matteo Garrone
• Love by Michael Haneke
• Lawless by John Hillcoat
• In Another Country by Hong Sang-soo
• The Taste of Money by Im Sang Soo
• Like Someone in Love by Abbas Kiarostami
• The Angels’ Share by Ken Loach
• In the Fog by Sergei Loznitsa
• Beyond the Hills by Cristian Mungiu
• After the Battle by Yousri Nasrallah
• Mud by Jeff Nichols
• You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Alain Resnais
• Post Tenebras Lux by Carlos Reygadas
• On the Road by Walter Salles
• Paradise: Love by Ulrich Seidi
• The Hunt by Thomas Vinterberg

The first thing that strikes me about this list of films is the sheer number of familiar names. Haneke eventually won for Love but he also won the Palme d’Or three years ago with The White Ribbon and has been a pillar of the art house filmmaking community since the early 1990s.  Similarly, Kiarostami, Loach, Anderson, Audiard, Resnais and Cronenberg are all familiar faces while Nichols, Salles, Garrone, Dominik, Reygadas, Daniels, Hillcoat, Hong, Im, Loznitsa, Mungiu and Vinterberg are all established filmmakers with varying degrees of mainstream success.

The second thing that strikes me about this list is that the average age of its directors is somewhere around the 55 mark.

The third (and most important) thing that strikes me about this list is that it is entirely composed of male filmmakers.

While I do not doubt for even a second that all of these films are entirely deserving of their places in the competition, I am concerned that the PR boost provided by this year’s Palme d’Or competition seems to have been reserved for a group of men who are already established names and whose films would most likely have been picked up for distribution regardless of whether or not they competed at Cannes. Indeed, there is simply no way that a Wes Anderson, Abbas Kiarostami or Michael Haneke film would somehow fall through the cracks and wind up creeping out as a low-key DVD release. The cinematic marketplace may be broken… but it ain’t that broken.

When a group of French feminists wrote a manifesto criticising the all-male shortlist and created a petition demanding greater transparency and inclusivity the board of directors promptly brushed the accusations aside:

The Festival de Cannes — in order to maintain its position and remain true to its beliefs rooted in universal rights — will continue to programme the best films from around the world ‘without distinction as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’

The board then went on to quote from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to support its supposed anti-discrimination policy. When this exercise in abject pomposity failed to convince anyone at all, the Cannes establishment wheeled out one of the younger and more female members of its jury, the supremely talented British director Andrea Arnold whose Fishtank and Wuthering Heights I very much enjoyed. In response to the charge of sexism, Arnold explained that:

“I would absolutely hate it if my film was selected because I was a woman (…) I would only want my film to be selected for the right reasons and not out of charity because I’m female.”

She then went on to add

“I would say it’s true the world over in the world of film. There’s just not that many film directors. I guess Cannes is a small pocket that represents how it is out in the world (…) That’s a great disappointment, because obviously women are half of the population and have voices and things to say about life and the world that probably would be good for us all to hear.”

In other words, Cannes’s failure to acknowledge the existence of talented female directors is due to the fact that male directors vastly outnumber their female counterparts. Though certainly true, this is no way invalidates the charge of sexism as choosing to perpetuate historical inequalities rather than confronting them makes you a willing party to the process of discrimination that caused those historical inequalities in the first place. The only time a woman has won the Cannes top prize in its seventy three-year history was when Jane Campion won the Palme d’Or for The Piano in 1993. Similarly shocking is the fact that 2011 marked a high tide in the participation of female directors when women directed only four out of the twenty films in competition. As La Barbe put it:

Men are fond of depth in women, so long as that depth applies solely to their cleavage.

Clearly, this shit is intolerable.

Aside from the obvious moral arguments about inclusivity and discrimination, there is also an important aesthetic argument to be made about the importance of unfamiliarity to the art house cinematic experience. Indeed, chief among the many pleasures of art house film is its ability to introduce us to whole new ways of seeing the world. For example, when Apichatpong Weerasethakul won in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, he was not only being rewarded for his cinematography and storytelling but also for his great skill at articulating what it must be like to see the world through his eyes, the eyes of a forty year-old gay man from Thailand. Similarly, when Cristian Mungiu won the Plame d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days he was not only being rewarded for the skill with which he explored the issue of abortion, but also for his capacity to speak for an entire generation of Romanians who grew up under the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Central to the appeal of art house cinema is its peerless ability to show us the world from an entirely different perspective. Indeed, it is telling that the success of both Weerasthakul and Mungiu lead directly to explosions of critical interest in films from their respective countries.  Art house cinema is all about new perspectives and art house cinema audiences are forever crying out for new ways of seeing the world.

By choosing only established male directors for competition, 2012 Cannes festival organisers ensured that their Palme d’Or would introduce no new conceptual blood into the cinematic bloodstream.

By choosing a shortlist dominated by elderly men, Cannes festival organisers denied art house cinema audiences the chance to discover something genuinely new.

By choosing to give the award to one of the greatest and most widely celebrated European film makers, the Palme d’Or jury ensured that art house cinemas will be devoting themselves yet again to exploring Michael Haneke’s vision of the world.

By choosing an all-male shortlist overwhelmingly dominated by old-age pensioners, Cannes festival organisers ensured that the films that set this year’s critical agenda will be those made by the people who already have all the power, all the influence, all the social capital and all the prestige.

By choosing to perpetuate art house cinema’s historic inequalities, Cannes festival organisers missed an opportunity to reach out to younger, non-male filmgoers and convince them that art house film can speak to them and their problems.

By choosing a shortlist dominated by familiar male faces, Cannes festival organisers made it clear that the art house establishment is happier celebrating old heroes than it is making new ones.

Given film’s singular capacity for challenging traditional ways of seeing the world, such conservatism and lack of ambition are deeply sad and deeply worrying for the future of art house film.

The first is made up of rejectionist accusations of wilful obscurantism.  The second is composed of equally ill-judged, but somewhat more charitable, suggestions that his films contain a profound political and/or spiritual message that we are unable to decode because we lack a sufficient knowledge of Thai culture.  Both of these views are attempts to articulate a sense of frustration with the fact that, despite his obvious technical and artistic skill, Weerasethakul is somehow failing to communicate his ideas in a way that makes them accessible to anyone who is not him.  This sense of frustration has also resulted in the emergence of a rather more drastic category of reaction.

The third category is best summed up by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s assertion that we suffer from “a lack of analytical context in which to place this material”.  Indeed, my own reaction to Weerasethakul’s work is that his films are both so obviously brilliant and so utterly incomprehensible that we need to develop an entirely new critical language in which to discuss his work.  A language focused not upon ‘narrative’ and ‘character’ but upon mood and atmosphere, the careful layering of images, colours and sounds to evoke emotional responses.  Under this view, Weerasethakul is effectively bypassing our traditional analytical tools and the tricks of cognition we use to make sense of cinema (and the world) in order to plug directly into our brains.

Weerasethakul’s latest film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (a.k.a. Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat) constitutes a serious challenge to this third approach to the director’s work.  It is a film that revisits many of the director’s favoured themes and images but places them into a much more traditionally cinematic framework.  Far from operating on the level of pure sensation, unadorned by critical analysis, Uncle Boonmee is a film littered with genre tropes and familiar ideas.  Ideas that not only make the work much easier to understand, but actually prompt us to revisit many of the director’s earlier works and ask whether — despite this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes — something has not been lost along the way.  Something beautiful and mysterious.

Film Poster

The film introduces us to Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), an ageing tamarind farmer whose recent success has allowed him not only to hire immigrant labour but also to start a bee-keeping business and build a cool concrete basement beneath his traditional wooden house.  However, though Boonmee enjoys a great deal of financial security, a cloak of sadness hangs about his withered shoulders.  A cloak stitched from past regrets (he admits that he killed a lot of ‘commies’ during his military service), lost loves (both his wife and his son disappeared) and a growing sense of his own imminent demise.  Indeed, despite Boonmee’s relative spryness, he is not a well man.  End-stage renal failure beckons and Boonmee has been forced to hire a local boy named Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) to serve as his nurse and ensure that he receive the dialysis treatments that keep him alive.

Boonmee and Jen

Wonderful use of colour

As his kidney function declines, Boonmee takes to thinking more and more about his past.  A past that suddenly looms up at him out of the forest in the shape of his dead wife’s ghost and his son who was long ago taken by the forest and transformed into a monkey ghost.  These two manifestations of the supernatural ably reflect Boonmee’s feelings about death: On the one hand, death may allow him to be re-united with his dead wife or, at the very least, to be free of the travails and sickness of his current existence.  On the other hand, death promises a departure for a world that is strange and terrifying, a world that can reach out and grab you at a moment’s notice, a world that makes little sense to men such as Boonmee.  Amidst beautifully shot flashbacks to what we can only assume are previous lives (one as a water buffalo that ran away from its owners and another as an aged princess who has sex with a magical cat fish in order to regain her youth), Boonmee chats to his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and tries to come to terms with his regrets before following his ghostly wife into the forest where he dies peacefully in his sleep.

The Hauntingly Strange Monkey Ghosts

One of Boonmee's previous lives

Veterans of Weerasethakul’s films will recognise much in Uncle Boonmee.
As in Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Tropical Malady (2004), Weerasethakul sets up a tension between the mundane realities of the world of men and the fantastical and romantic possibilities of the world of spirits.  Indeed, Boonmee is presented as something of an interstitial figure who passes, at different times, through both worlds; one minute he is in the world of men, speaking French with his Laotian employees before watching them sort tamarind fruit, and the next he is sitting down to dinner with the ghost of his dead wife and a terrifying red-eyed creature that was once his son.  Boonmee’s imminent death means that he is about to pass out of the world of men and into the world of spirits but he is held in the world of men by medical technology.  Weerasethakul’s parents were both doctors and, as in Syndromes and a Century, the mundane and unglamorous realities of medical treatment serve as a counter-weight to the director’s mystical instincts.

While Syndromes and a Century saw the forest serving as a kind of benign reminder of warmer emotions and happier possibilities, both Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours (2002) presented the forest as an inherently magical place.  A place where myth became real and all possibilities were made tangible.  Uncle Boonmee continues to present the forest as profoundly alien to the values of civilisation anchored in the realities of medical practice but the film presents a far more nuanced account of that opposition.  Indeed, both Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours present the forest as a place where romantic possibilities are made real.  Oppressed sexuality and unfulfilled romantic yearnings find their fruition only once the characters step out of the world of men and into the world of the forest.  However, Uncle Boonmee presents the forest as a place of darkness and danger as well as light and love.  A place where savage things dwell and people die.  A place not only where possibilities are born but where possibilities are closed off in that most emphatically mortal of ways.  Indeed, this darkening of Weerasethakul’s treatment of the forest not only contributes to Uncle Bonmee feeling more intellectually substantial than many of Weerasethakul’s earlier films, it also serves to make it a good deal more accessible to Western audiences as Weerasethakul’s depiction of the forest chimes almost perfectly with its place in our own cultural imagination.

Book Cover

In his excellent book Forests – The Shadow of Civilization (1992), Robert Pogue Harrison states that :

in the religions, mythologies and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray.  Or where our subjective categories are confounded.  Or where perceptions become promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness.  In the forest the inanimate may suddenly become animate, the god turns into a beast, the outlaw stands for justice, Rosalind appears as a boy the virtuous knight degenerates into a wild man, the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary gives way to the fabulous.  – pp. x

It is when Weerasethakul deals with the transition between worlds that his films most come to resemble works of genre.  Indeed, it is difficult to watch Uncle Boonmee without being reminded of the works of Hiyao Miyazaki whose Stugio Ghibli films including My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Porco Rosso (1992), Spirited Away (2001) and Ponyo (2008) all revolve around collisions between the mundane world of men and the exciting and colourful worlds of magic and spirit.  Indeed, Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) features an all-out war between an encroaching human civilisation and the arboreal spirit realm that culminates with the brutal decapitation of the Spirit of the Forest by the ruler of the iconically-named human inhabitation Iron Town.

Family Resemblance

Like many of the works of Miyazaki, Uncle Boonmee presents itself as an intrusion fantasy.  The nature of this genre form is brilliantly detailed by the critic Farah Mendlesohn in her Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008).  The intrusion fantasy, according to Mendlesohn, presents the fantastical as

the bringer of chaos.  It is the beast in the bottom of the garden, or the elf seeking assistance.  It is horror and amazement.  It takes us out of our safety without taking us from our place.  It is recursive.  The intrusion fantasy is not necessarily unpleasant, but it has at its base the assumption that normality is organized, and that when the fantastic retreats the world, while not necessarily unchanged, returns to predictability — at least until the next element of the fantastic intrudes. – pp. xxi-xxii

The problem facing Weerasethakul is one of increasing familiarity.  When he had the farm boy turn into a tiger in Tropical Malady, the move was so unexpected and so magically weird that it seemed to transgress all known laws of cinematic story-telling.  It worked but it did not work for any obvious reason.  As a quasi-narrative technique it took a defiant step off of the beaten cinematic path.  However, three films later and the same excursions from the beaten path have started to wear grooves in the earth.  Now, when we are asked to step off the beaten track we are no longer all at sea, we are in familiar territory.  Territory made familiar not only by Weerasethakul’s repeated use of the same techniques but also by a dawning realisation that Weerasethakul is not so much forging his own path through the forest as uncovering a path that already existed.  Mendlesohn perfectly articulates the challenge of the intrusion fantasy and, in so doing, explains why it is that Uncle Boonmee is such a profoundly unsatisfying cinematic experience.

Book Cover

The intrusion fantasy, according to Mendlesohn, demands “constant amazement”, its incursions into our world are meant to be alienating and puzzling but this effect is difficult to maintain :

The required awestruck or skeptical tone is tricky and may contribute to the preference for stylistic realism in order to maintain the contrast between the normal world and the fantastic intrusion.  It also may explain the tendency of the intrusion fantasy to continually introduce new protagonists, and to up the ante on the nature or number of the horrors.  Horror, amazement, and surprise are difficult to maintain if the protagonist has become accustomed to them.  Escalation — of many kinds — is an important element of the rhetoric. – pp. xxii

Uncle Boonmee suffers not only for the fact that its protagonists are completely accepting of the fantastical but also for the fact that his repeated use of the same fantastical motifs mean that his audience are now accepting of his use of the fantastical.  In other words, when Boonmee travels into the forest and encounters weird creatures, we are not surprised.  We are not surprised because we have seen this type of thing happen before in Weerasethakul’s films.  The fantastic has lost its power to shock and estrange.  It has become mundane.  We are as blasé about it as Weerasethakul’s characters.
Weerasethakul’s decision to re-use the same set of techniques in Uncle Boonmee not only deprives this particular film of much of its potential power, it also serves to undermine many of his earlier and more interesting films.  Indeed, by failing to escalate his use of the fantastical, Weerasethakul has effectively defused the capacity for estrangement captured by his earlier works.  Uncle Boonmee is accessible enough that it provides us with a useful crib sheet with which to make sense of his use of magical forests and spiritual incursions in films like Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours and Syndromes and a Century.  By failing to escalate and innovate Weerasethakul has not only undermined his entire body of work, he has also undermined his own position as something of a cinematic ‘incursion’.

Just as his magical forest no longer has the power to shock or amaze us, the same is true of his incursions into the cinematic landscape.  By lapsing into a familiar and comprehensible cinematic rhetoric, Weerasethakul no longer appears as a strange and visionary genius whose bizarre techniques and strange cinematic textures demand a whole new critical vocabulary.  He now comes across as a far more mundane creature: a cinematic fantasist who uses art house techniques rather than special effects to portray the numinous and the spiritual and by submitting himself to existing critical vocabularies, Weerasethakul also opens himself up to criticism.

Uncle Boonmee is a film that feels oddly unfinished, like a train of thought that has derailed before arriving at its final destination.

The film is reportedly based upon a Thai novel called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.  Written by a monk but based upon a real-life Boonmee, the book deals with a man who can see beyond the vanishing point of karma’s great wheel to his previous incarnations.  Though I have not read the book or found any serious discussion of it, one can imagine a book in which a man’s capacity to see his past lives dovetails with his desire to look back over his current life in view of his impending death.  Just as a person might claim not to ‘be’ the person or animal he was in his previous lives, a person might just as easily claim not to ‘be’ the person they were when they committed some action in their past for which they feel a good deal of regret or culpability.  Indeed, is the Boonmee depicted in the film the same Boonmee who ‘killed a lot of commies’?  is he the same Boonmee who escaped as a water buffalo or had sex with a catfish in order to retain his youth?  By featuring a man who is not only looking back over his own life but who also seems capable of experiencing elements of his previous lives, Weerasethakul seems poised to reflect on the issue of personal identity through time but he somehow never manages to get round to it.  Boonmee mentions his past but draws no conclusions.  We are shown vignettes we assume to be part of Boonmee’s previous lives but they are never explicitly referred to, let alone explained.  We have to rely upon the film’s title alone to make sense of these vignettes.  It is almost as though Weerasethakul has assembled the ingredients of a great cinematic dish only to decide, in the end, not to step into the kitchen.  Of course, not being familiar with the source material it seems dishonest and unhinged to criticise Weerasethakul for failing to make the most of his adaptation but these different forms of remembrance sit so neatly together that it is utterly frustrating that Weerasethakul fails to connect the dots or do anything with the few fresh ideas that he does bother to introduce.

It is almost as though, by repeating the same string of beautiful nonsense syllables over and over again, Weerasethakul has allowed us to recognise a few words and, upon recognising enough words to make out a few of the sentences, the flaws in his grammar have become increasingly apparent and increasingly grating.

This trade-off between accessibility and the raw power of cognitive estrangement features as a theme in Weerasethakul’s first film.  Mysterious Objects at Noon (2000) is billed as an experimental documentary but in truth it more closely resembles a game of cinematic chinese whispers in which Weerasethakul and his crew travel around Thailand asking various people to add a sentence to a story.  Initially, the story is a strange one that makes little sense but soon the strangeness is beaten back by the decision by some participants to put a science fictional spin on the story.  Suddenly the strangeness is replaced by a sense of familiarity as quirks are explained away and familiar tropes and techniques come to dominate the story’s foreground.  By the time the film concludes with a theatre company putting on the story as a semi-improvised performance, the sense of spontaneity and Otherness has entirely dissipated in favour of an impression of a poorly written mis-match of ugly ideas jammed on stage by a group of talentless actors.  Possibilities are eclipsed.  Weirdness is tidied away.  Otherness is tamed.

Not so Mysterious Any More

My great fear is that the arc of Weerasethakul’s story in Mysterious Objects at Noon will come to mirror the arc of his career as a director.  From the magnificently Other to the painfully familiar.  From the strange to the mundane.  From the new to the tired.  This time it is not the critic but Weerasethakul himself who needs to create a new vocabulary for self-expression.

Indeed, Blissfully Yours (Sud Sanaeha) could easily have been made by a European art house director.  It is, after all, a fairly straightforward exploration of the temptation to ignore one’s problems in order to take pleasure in the present.  While the film does share many of the images that Weerasethakul would deploy so forcefully in films like Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, it is also a much darker film.  A film that seems strangely at odds with the warm-hearted mysticism of Weerasethakul’s later films and the critical reaction to them.

Film Poster

The film opens in a doctor’s office.  Being examined on the couch is a handsome young man named Min (Min Oo).  He does not speak.  He is completely passive.  When the doctor asks him questions they are answered instead by a young woman named Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram) and an older woman named Orn (Jenjira Jansuda).  However, the passivity does not appear to be a reflection of Min’s medical condition.  He has skin lesions and a sore throat that apparently prevents him from speaking but the two women appear to be using the young man as the basis for some scheme.  Indeed, Orn repeatedly begs the doctor for a medical certificate for Min but the doctor refuses as she has not seen any identification confirming his identity.

Min surrounded by doting women

As we move out of the doctor’s office, Weerasethakul fills in the back-story and the network of relationships that animate it.  It would appear that Min is an illegal immigrant from Burma.  He is dating Roong and Roong is paying Orn to help Min get the paperwork that will allow him to work in Thailand.  Paperwork that can be gained using an official medical certificate.  Orn is married and desperately wants a child.  A child that her husband seems incapable of providing her with.  As a result, she has started an affair with a younger man and clearly has eyes for Min.  Roong is aware of this and there is a tension between the two women.  A tension that is played out comically over a pot of moisturiser.  Moisturiser bought at great expense by Roong and ‘improved’ by Orn who dumps a load of fruit into it in order to help Min treat his skin problems.  Because of Roong’s possessiveness of Min, she has also taken to leaving work early.  This means that she is failing to meet her quotas and she may well lose her job as a result.  Weerasethakul establishes all of this baggage with astonishing grace and economy.  Within forty minutes, the stage is set for what might be described, in dramatic terms, as a huge barney.  But the barney never comes.

Looks like some kind of fruit salad...

...Made with skincare products.

Instead Weerasethakul changes the game.  Much like Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours is a film in two acts.  Acts in which the forest serves as a kind of secondary world.  A world in which emotions loom larger and the fantastical becomes a distinct possibility.  This is the forest that appears as a backdrop to the first half of Syndromes and a Century but not the second.  This is the forest in which a country boy turns into a tiger in Tropical Malady.  Weerasethakul’s use of the forest as a visual motif for escape from reality (whether psychological, emotional or fantastical) is reminiscent of Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s use of water in such films as Dark Water (2002) and Ring (1998).

Min and Roong venture into the forest...

There's a very similar shot to this one during the opening to Tropical Malady.

Fantastical iconography. All you need is Mr Tumnus.

Here, the forest is presented as a venue for escaping from the pressures of the real world.  It is a place of emotional stasis.  A place where people’s problems might melt away.  It is like the Zone in the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972) and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), or the mysterious lunar structure in Budrys’ Rogue Moon (1960), or the Event Site in Harrison’s Nova Swing (2006).  A place where cause and effect is somehow disrupted.  Except of course it isn’t.  Because you can’t escape your problems so easily.  Min takes Roong to the forest in order to help her chill out from work (a strange idea in itself as Roong is seldom at work and what work-related problems she does have stem from her tendency to keep taking time off).  But Orn is also present in the forest with her husband.  The two couples spend their time in the forest in a state of Edenic bliss.  Happily wandering through the trees, allowing the water to lap against their feet, having sex and eating.

Bliss

Bliss

Bliss

The desire to avoid the problems of the real world is so intense that the characters become completely passive whilst in the forest.  As though they have been infected with whatever it is that affects Min.  At one point, Orn wanders away from her husband and finds her way to the younger couple.  Along the way she gets lost and stumbles across a load of drums seemingly containing toxic waste.  It is as though she somehow has to quest in order to reach Min and Roong.

Oil Drums and Facemask. But how does Orn find people she knows in the middle of a forest?

When she does, her desire for Min is obvious and the tensions between the women begin to resurface but the mood of the forest is such that the two women never quite have an argument.  Instead they bathe Min together and then Min and Roong go off and have sex alone while Orn lies on the floor weeping.  Weeping for her failure to seduce Min.  Weeping for her failures.  Weeping for being left alone.

Apart

It is telling that Min’s only action in the film is to lure the women to the forest.  It is a place in which Min’s apparent passivity comes to infect the people around him.  Min’s role in bringing Orn and Roong to the forest underlines the darkness of the character.  Min is not simply a sex object, he is an object of addiction.  His presence in the lives of both Roong and Orn is unhealthy.  It leads to them risking their relationships and their jobs in order to be with him.  Min is both a receptacle for Roong and Orn’s refusal to deal with their real-world problems, and a multiplier of those problems.  He is an invitation to mortgage one’s future for the pleasures of the present.  A fact nicely illustrated by Min’s chance encounter with a man who, within seconds, makes a pass at him.  Then, a few minutes later, we see the man on a motorbike pursuing the car containing Min.  Min is the promise of the moment.  A present moment which, in the forest, seems to last for ever, but which is ultimately only ever going to be short-lived.  Min offers the promise of escape but because one cannot so easily escape one’s real world problems, he is a problem in himself.  Indeed, Min’s dark nature is further reflected both in Weerasethakul’s comments about the character (namely that he wrote the script thinking that Min had AIDS) and the pre-credit epilogue, in which it is revealed that Min soon moved on to another place leaving Roong to return to her original boyfriend.  A boyfriend she returned to, presumably, without a job but with the HIV virus.

The temptations of the Now

Min seems to exude the desire to waste one's time on idle errands

Blissfully Yours serves as a fascinating counterpoint to the magical realism of Tropical Malady.  It is a much darker film because it shows a strange  scepticism regarding the whimsical and fantastical elements that Weerasethakul would go on to introduce into his later films.  It is a film that appears to speak directly to the characters of Tropical Malady as though to say “Don’t wait until you’re in the forest.  If you love each other do something about it now!”.

I suspect that aesthetic sensibilities are the products of their owner’s culture.  The values themselves are formed over time by generation upon generation of artists telling similar kinds of stories and yet gradually changing both the stories and the forms those stories take.  This is why older texts can seem odd or unbalanced to modern readers.  It is also why critics have to be alive to the possibility that sometimes, a failure to toe the line is not a failure but a great success.  As John Crowley puts it in The Solitudes (1987), the first part of his Aegypt cycle :

“It seems to me that what grants meaning in folk tales and legendary narratives – We’re thinking now of something like the Niebelungdenlied or the Morte D’Arthur – is not logical development so much as thematic repetition.  The same ideas, or events, or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances.  Or different objects contained in similar circumstances. (…) A hero sets out (…) to find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle, or find a garden.  Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches, is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden.  Repeated in different forms like a set of nesting boxes.  Each of them, however, just as large, or no smaller, than all the others.  The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form.  The  pattern continues until a kind of certainty arrises.  A satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem, at last, to have been really told.  Not uncommonly, an old romance’s  story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters.  Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions or inherent in a story’s premises, logical completion as a vehicle of meaning… all that is later.  Not necessarily later in time but belonging to a later, more sophisticated, kind of literature.  There are some interesting half-way kind of works like The Fairy Queen, which set up for themselves a titanic plot , an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it… never need to finish it.  Because they are, at heart, works of the older kind.  And the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them.  The flavour is already there.  So, is this any help to our thinking?  Is meaning in history like the solution to an equation or like a repeated flavour?  Is it to be sought for, or tasted?”

This passage raises two interesting ideas.  Firstly, it raises the possibility of a time when different aesthetic principles were in force.  The Arthurian myths and romances are not primitively written works with a questionable track record when it comes to coherence, but rather works that appealed to a different idea of what makes a good story.  Not all stories need to take the same form or follow the same rules in order to be great.  Not all conceptions of character have to fit in with our current folk-psychological models.  Secondly, it hints at a model of aesthetic revolution.  An almost Darwinian process through which stories are told, abandoned, revisited, rebooted, reinterpreted and retold.  Crowley is speaking of stories within a certain mythical tradition or saga but might this not also be true of the telling of stories in general?  Might this process not also explain how certain kinds of story-telling can evolve over time?

Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (2007) has appeared on a number of ‘Best Films of the Decade’ -type lists.  I consider it to be quite a dull film.  My problem with Reygadas’ work is that it is a film that deals in themes and techniques that will be familiar to anyone who has seen a work of post-War cinema.  It clings limpet-like to the existentialist tradition that was pioneered by the likes of Bergman and Antonioni and it explores these well-trodden themes using the same set of cinematic techniques that all art house directors have been using since the 60s.  Silent Light contains long takes.  Silent Light contains awkward silences.  Silent Light contains ambiguous plotting.  Silent Light contains a fantastical dream sequence.  To watch Silent Light is to gag on the stench of intellectual decay.  It is as though the post-War art house consensus has finally played itself out, its stories told and retold using the same old techniques.  Just as the Cahiers du Cinema critics who would become the directors of the Nouvelle Vague once rejected the theatricality of French post-War cinema, do we stand at a point in time when the story-tellers have to move on?  Must new tools and new stories be told for this and the next generation?  One director who seems to instinctively answer this question with a resounding affirmative is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director whose Tropical Malady I wrote about a short while ago.  His Syndromes and a Century is not merely a good film, it is a film that makes a robustly compelling argument for Weerasethakul to be considered one of the greatest living film-makers.

Film Poster

Syndromes and a Century begins in a light-hearted and humanistic vein.  The first half of the film is set in a rural medical centre.  Out the window we can see trees, the rooms are bathed with warm sunlight.  The sense of well-being and relaxed happiness also envelops the patients and doctors who are all merrily eccentric.  We are shown a pretty female doctor (Nantarat Sawaddikul) bamboozling a former military doctor (Jaruchai Iamaram) with a series of bizarre interview questions.  We see the same female doctor trying to reason with an elderly monk who is plagued by chicken dreams and desperate to trade herbal infusions for sleeping pills.  We are then shown one of the elderly monk’s acolytes (Sakda Kaewbuadee) hitting it off with his dentist.  Apparently the monk wishes he could have been a DJ.  Apparently the dentist is also a successful Thai Country and Western singer.  While a lot of the warmth and humanity of the medical centre flows from the look of the place and the way in which Weerasethakul lights it and films it, it also seems like a happy place because it is filled with potential love.  The female doctor is clearly flirtatiously teasing her terrified interviewee before fending off the romantic devotion of another hospital employee with a story of her relationship with a local orchid farmer.  Even the monk and dentist get in on the act when their discussions take a decidedly romantic turn.

First Interview

First visit from the old monk

First visit to the dentist

As with Tropical Malady’s cinema sequence, Syndromes and a Century’s moments of romantic tenderness fizz with incredible joy, excitement and sexual tension as the polite formality of Thai small-talk melts almost seamlessly into a seductive and subtle ballet of suggestion, reciprocation and escalation.  An impression only heightened by the very unadorned timbre of the sub-titles on the BFI edition of the DVD.  Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a genuinely gifted observer of the subtleties of human mating rituals and he reproduces them on-screen with dazzling effect.  It is simply impossible not to smile when the dentist asks the monk whether he is the reincarnation of his dead brother.

The Monk and the Dentist having a quiet chat

Then, halfway through the film (as with Tropical Malady), a change takes place.  We move from the warmth of the rural medical centre to the cold technology of a huge city hospital.  Gone is the warm sunlight, replaced by artificial lighting.  Gone are the trees and rivers, replaced by stark angles and concrete.  We no longer have whimsical patients but rooms full of amputees learning to walk with artificial limbs.  Clearly, the world has moved on.  Yet some things have stayed the same.

Corridors...

Corridors...

Corridors...

Corridors...

The film reprises two particular scenes.  The now greying former military doctor undertakes the same job interview.  His answers are the same but his manner is more confident.  When he leaves the room, as in the first version of the scene, the interviewer is approached by someone who gives her a gift.  Similarly, we see the old monk.  Still plagued by chicken dreams.  Still trying to exchange questionable herbal remedies for real medication.  This time the monk who is having his teeth examined has a cloth pulled over his eyes.  Each time he attempts to remove the cloth, the dentist puts it back in place.  A couple make out in the doctor’s office but the kiss seems as cold and loveless as the office building itself.  The woman shows the doctor images of a huge building site, she asks him whether he would like to move there in order to be with her.  The doctor is silent.  There is no friendship or love to be had here.

The Second Interview

A Second visit from the old monk

This motif of repetition and change is an intriguing one that brings to mind Crowley’s words on traditional literary forms.  Weerasethakul has said that the film is partly biographical and based on the lives of his parents.  This invites an interpretation of hostility to change.  As the doctors grow older the world around them becomes harsher and colder and yet the same problems remain.  The same people are looking for love, friendship and drugs but not finding them.  But this rather literal interpretation of the film ignores the metaphysical character of much of the dialogue.  Throughout the film, the characters speak of their former and their future lives.  As Buddhists who buy into the idea of reincarnation, this is clearly a pressing concern.  When the dentist suggests that the monk may be his reincarnated brother, there is the suggestion of a deep bond.  A depth not only between people but also within them.  For some of these characters, reincarnation and dharma are central to their worldview, central to the folk psychological models they use to make sense of other people.  For Buddhists, lives are lived over and over again with variations and yet the souls remain the same.  Forever accumulating and losing spiritual capital as the wheel continues to turn.

Metallic Shade Vs. Sunlit Green

Syndromes and a Century expresses a very particular attitude to change.  The film seems to suggest that each moment is filled with possibility.  Possibilities of love, possibilities of happiness and possibilities of sadness.  Sometimes our lives will go through good patches, filled with positive possibilities, and other times they will go through periods of darkness even though ostensibly nothing very much has changed.  The film ends with a wonderfully haunting montage of shots.  We see work going on in the hospital, as though time and the passage of a life calls for its dismantling.  We see smoke being sucked into a black pipe.  We see statues in a park, testaments to former lives.  Then we see people walking through the park on a warm-looking evening.  The film ends with footage of a huge aerobic routine conducted in the park to an insanely catchy and up-beat pop song.  The wheel has turned and we move from an age of technological austerity and aloofness to one that seems filled with more fun and whimsy.

Into the abyss...

... and out into the sunlight.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a director who works largely through suggestion.  His palette is one of moods and ideas that are offered up to the audience not, as Crawley puts it, as an equation to solve, but rather an intellectual dish to be sampled and slowly digested.  Compare it with a similar film from the Western art house tradition and this distinction snaps immediately into view.  Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), much like Reygadas’ Silent Light, uses a certain number of techniques to explore a certain number of themes familiar to fans of this kind of cinema.  Like Weerasethakul he uses repetition of key scenes but these repetitions are attempts to look at a similar phenomenon from different perspectives.  We watch Elephant and we slowly pull together not only the time-line of the day of the shooting, but also what might have caused the shooting in the first place.  Van Sant drops hints with astonishing skill and grace such as when he undercuts the clean-cut happiness of the Highschool with scenes of bullying and bullemia, suggesting that not all is well.  He also has a group of students discussing homosexuality only for the shooters to be seen showering together.  These ideas operate not at the level of mood but at the level of the plot device.  Elephant is not a film to be sampled, it is a film to be solved.

Film Poster

Rewatching Syndromes and a Century, I am struck by the danger that any serious piece of interpretative writing about it (as I attempted above) might crush the film’s gentle semiotics.  To nail down the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul is to collapse their wave function and to end their gentle interplay of ideas and possibilities.  Just as film directors need to develop new ways of telling stories, so critics must attempt to find a way of discussing such experimental works without treating them as works from an older age.  This might well go some way to explaining why it is that critics like these kinds of films far more than most cinema goers.  To sit before a blank laptop screen with a desire to write about a film such as Syndromes and a Century is an opportunity to break new ground, to be a cartographer, to build a new aesthetic.  That is a wonderful challenge for a film-maker to offer.

One such culture is that of Thailand.  Thailand’s attitude towards gay rights is genuinely fascinating.  Since the military coup of 2006, Thai government has been edging closer to using a third gender for administrative purposes.  A third gender designed to accommodate the Kathoey, a caste of Thai society that we tend to refer to either simplistically as transwomen or, with the teeth grinding that accompanies potential political incorrectness, ladyboys.  In truth, “Kathoey” is a much broader category than male-to-female transsexual.  Originally, it was coined to describe intersexuals but since the mid 20th Century onwards, it has come to designate everything from post-operative transsexuals to effeminate gay men.  This category of person has existed for a long time in Thailand and, thanks to Buddha’s teaching of tolerance, they are not mocked or physically attacked in the way that TG people can be in the West.  However, they are also victims of terrible discrimination and frequently find themselves working in the ‘entertainment’ industry because people refuse to hire them for other jobs.  Even if they are university graduates.  I mention the Kathoeys as, for a long time, the Kathoeys served to mask the existence of Thai homosexuality.  In Thai culture, sexuality is defined largely in terms of gender and the idea of two masculine men having sex or a relationship simply did not figure.  It was not a common mode of identity.  Indeed, in the late 70s there were only ten gay entertainment venues in the Patpong area of Bangkok.  A decade later, there were over a hundred such places spread out across the country.  In a sense, homosexuality – as we in the west understand the word – only really appeared in Thailand in the 1970s and since then it has attracted more than its fair share of ill-treatment from officials who are more than happy to crack down on a new mode of being.

It is against this rather alien and seemingly conflicting set of cultural attitudes that Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes films such as Tropical Malady (a.k.a. Sud Pralad), a lusciously atmospheric film comprising a a beautifully chaste love story and a fable in which one of the young men turns into a tiger.

Film Poster

One of the most striking things about Tropical Malady is the playfulness of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  In general, when one talks of playful directors one in fact means wilful perversity of the kind demonstrated by such habitual audience baiters as Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier.  Weerasethakul, however, embodies a different kind of playfulness.  The kind of playfulness that comes from complete technical control and a desire to display it.  Weerasethakul is a director who positively oozes creative confidence.  We first encounter this in the opening sequence.  A flawless exercise in faux documentary stylings in which a group of patrolling soldiers comes across a body.  Chattering away to each other, the group cheerfully pose for photos with the corpse (doubtless for their MySpace pages) and then set out for the local village.  As the group disappear into the jungle, music begins to play and the camera slowly moves forward.  The clash of styles is subtle and yet powerful.  It is almost as though, having allowed us to settle down into a realistic film, Weerasethakul suddenly decides to pull the rug out from below us.  All is not as it appears…

Travelling from the outside in, or the inside out?

We soon learn that the soldiers had been sent out to investigate a series of tiger attacks around a village in the jungle.  While bunking with a local family, soldier Keng (Bonlop Lomnoi) takes a shine to the son of the family, a somewhat directionless youth named Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee).  When Tong goes into the city to look for work (he dresses as a soldier in the hope that it will allow him to get his foot in the door) he runs into Keng and the pair strike up a friendship.

Flirting

Weerasethakul presents modern Thailand as a deeply romantic and sensual place.  When the soldiers pose with the corpse they talk of sending the picture to their girlfriends.  As they walk back to the village, they flirt with the female radio operator.  When Keng and Tong run into each other in town, Tong is reacting somewhat ambivalently to a very pretty girl who is flirting with him on the bus.  Against such brazen sensuality, Tong and Keng’s relationship comes across as incredibly demure.  Keng gives Tong a Clash tape and teaches him to drive a truck and takes him out places but Tong is quite a remote figure.  As the film progresses, Keng starts to push Tong harder and harder, but Tong remains strangely evasive.  In one intensely erotic scene, Keng touches Tong’s knee in the cinema and Tong reacts by playfully crossing his legs, preventing Keng from removing his hand.  Tong seems so innocent that he is almost childlike.  He remains distant from Keng and yet Keng keeps returning.

Jeu de mains...

... jeu de villain

If this were a western film one would speak of the pair being separated by a closet door : Keng refuses to open the closet and Tong refuses to exit it and yet the two clearly feel some kind of connection, a connection poorly hidden beneath broad smiles and innocent pleasantries.  In fact, Tong’s behaviour is so eccentric that it appears to only be explicable if viewed through a lens of self-denial or delusion.  Even when Keng grabs Tong’s hand in order to smell his fingers after urination, Tong responds not by kissing him or playing along with the advance, but by licking his hands like some kind of pet.  Is it all a game for him?

Note the impassive face

The film then changes gear.  We are told of a Thai folk tale in which a powerful shaman was said to live in the forest and assume the shapes of the animals.  This sets up Keng being sent into the forest near Tong’s home in order to hunt down the man-eating tiger who killed the man at the beginning of the film.

Not doing too well

Keng’s time in the jungle weighs heavily on his mind.  Cut off from base by a faulty radio he wanders around looking for the tiger only to realise that, in fact, the tiger may well be stalking him.  Before long, he starts to lose his mind, he hears the monkeys speaking to him and warning him of the tiger who is both hungry and lonely.  Indeed, initially we do not see the tiger but we do see a naked and upset Tong.  The suggestion is that Tong is the tiger, both literally and symbolically.  This strange and beautiful fable takes up half of the film’s running time and is almost devoid of dialogue.  Its role is to explain the strangeness of the film’s opening half.  To explain Tong’s strange behaviour.  As though some truths are so huge or ancient that they can only be expressed through the telling of stories.

Keng and Tong meet again

A simple reading would be that Tong and Keng are in love but that, because he is a shape-shifter, Tong refuses to return Keng’s affections.  His child-like innocence is both evasive and a result of the savagery of his alternate state.  His nature is divided, split into two.  However, while this fantastical reading fits Tropical Malady’s narrative, it is rather literal minded.  Tong appears to turn into a tiger because he does turn into a Tiger.  Such a simple-minded reading strikes me as deeply unsatisfactory.  Weerasethakul is a playful director whose careful invocation of myths and legends from his native Thailand scream out for a deeper and more socially aware interpretation.  So here is mine…

With Legendary antecedents

As gay men, Tong and Keng exist on the margins of Thai society.  Tong lives in the forest and Keng works in the forest as a soldier.  Keng is better integrated into the mainstream of Thai culture because he is a soldier.  A traditionally masculine role.  Indeed, when Tong applies for jobs he does so dressed in a military uniform, as though superstitiously hoping to ward off the kind of discrimination against which GLBT Thais still have precious little protection.  Keng’s pursuit of Tong appears like a one-sided hunt.  He does all of the running while Tong remains aloof.  However, as with the soldier who realises that he is actually the one being hunted, Tong is actually seducing Keng without him knowing it.  His coquettish charms and childlike behaviour not only woo Keng, they hopelessly inflame him.  Here is a proud and handsome man reduced to sniffing Tong’s fingers on the grounds he had just been holding his cock.  Much like the shamans of myth, Tong is a transgressive figure.  His values are not those of the Thai mainstream.  Despite being penniless ignorant farmers, his parents are completely accepting of Tong’s homosexuality.  They not only welcome Keng, they ask him to move in and help with the farm.  They treat him as a prospective son-in-law.  When the soldier finally meets the tiger, the tiger shares himself with the soldier.  We assumed that it was Keng who was the more experienced and the more worldly, but in reality, it is Tong who knows his own world and Keng who must learn its true nature.

Tropical Malady is an intensely beautiful film.  Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a technically superb director with an absolute mastery for tone and atmosphere but his true skill lies in his mis-en-scene.  Simply put, I cannot remember the last time I saw a film as well blocked as this one.  The cinematic fumble is as exquisitely choreographed as a fight scene, the limbs of the two characters snake in and out of each other like the trees and vines that dominate the visuals of the film’s second half.  Meanwhile, the film, already light on dialogue, could be viewed with the sound and sub-titles off, so perfectly observed and infinitely nuanced is the body language fizzing between Lomnoi and Kaewbuadee.

This is yet another GLBT film that puts the shirtless face-sucking of the gay indie film scene well and truly in its place.  It is a genuine work of art.