January 15, 2003

HIS NAME IS Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but he goes by the nickname Joe. A generous favor to those who remain indolently trapped in English? A commercial-minded comic gesture by a filmmaker who names Andy Warhol as a major influence? Either way, this Joe isn't ordinary.

Driving, the working title of Weerasethakul's second feature film, captures one of his invigorating, idiosyncratic tactics. Both of his full-length movies definitely drive, in the most literal sense (at times the camera is just another passenger during car trips through towns and rural landscapes of Thailand) and in the figurative sense: the story lines of Mysterious Object at Noon and what's come to be known as Blissfully Yours radically shift as they move forward. They're as unpredictable as the road itself, and capable of changing even faster than the scenery.

Weerasethakul was born in Khon Kaen, a small town about five hours away from Bangkok. But the genesis for his first feature took place far from northeast Thailand, in Chicago, where he studied film at the city's School of the Art Institute in the mid '90s. He was drawn to the college because of its experimental film program, yet Mysterious Object was partially inspired by a visit, while playing hooky, to its extensive exquisite corpse collection. There, looking at the fragmented-yet-connected collaborative writings and drawings – artworks in which each new contributor added unaware or only partially aware of the previous section – he decided to make a cinematic version.

The result is a movie that's a documentary, a soap opera, a science-fiction odyssey, a true contemporary folktale – and a road trip. It begins behind the wheel (or the windshield, to be exact) of a car as the radio broadcasts an ad for a melodramatic serial titled "Tomorrow I Will Love You." One scene later, the car has become a truck, and the ad has given way to loud live announcements – "Tuna fish is coming, steamed or salted" – by a mic-carrying driver. In the back of the vehicle a woman describes a terrible event from her childhood: her father traded her away for bus fare. "How can a father sell his daughter away?" she asks tearfully, staring down at her knees.

A voice answers her with another question: "Now do you have any other stories to tell us?" At first, the request seems rude. "What else can I tell you, real or fake?" is her initial reply. But then she begins to tell a tale of a crippled boy and his teacher, a woman named Dogfahr. This tale becomes the movie's story, a story continued – alternately imagined and enacted but always revealed – by the people Weerasethakul's camera encounters as he continues to journey through Thailand. The large cast includes an old lady getting drunk, a village theater group, and a child actor anxious to collect payment – which includes KFC chicken – so he can read a comic book. ("My time is precious," he reminds the director.)

Beholden to the whims of the yarn-spinners who decide their fate, Dogfahr and her young pupil go through a dizzying series of transformations as the film unfolds. The mysterious object of the title is a round ball that rolls out from under the teacher's skirt. This ball becomes a mysterious boy, and Dogfahr soon has a double as well. Weerasethakul's slipshod methods of depicting the story are inventive. After a storyteller attributes the crippled boy's injuries to war, Weerasethakul cuts to a TV talk show segment devoted to an infant who survived a plane crash. Why did the baby survive? "He wore amulets," a smiling adult explains. And in discovering new intersections between real life and reel life, the movie returns to the very beginning of its story – Dogfahr's boys meet a fate similar to that of the woman who first describes them, before some other schoolchildren provide a few more cartoon-inspired narrative twists.

Replacing Mysterious Object's black and white with a sensual, green-leaf color scheme, Blissfully Yours shares more than a penchant for lengthy drives – presentations of the landscape as viewed by its citizens – with its predecessor. Both films contain scenes set at a doctor's office, and in both, an old man who desires a hearing aid and his stoic daughter entwine a doctor in family disputes. The sequences have comic spark: these patients try the patience of the physician, who is forced to ignore complaints ("My dear doctor, I advise you to have a son") while she prescribes cures. The sequences also highlight the ridiculous costs of health care – particularly in the latter film.

In Blissfully Yours, before attending to the old man (who has gotten the hearing aid he desires), the doctor sees Min, Roong, and Orn, the film's central characters. Min is there for his inexplicable skin condition, but at a certain point in the visit, it becomes apparent that Orn – who seems to be a maternal figure to the man and other woman, Roong – is not so covertly trying to finagle a health certificate for the shy Min, a Burmese immigrant, so he can secure a job. All the trio wind up receiving is a prescriptive cream to which Orn promptly adds her own ingredients: cucumber, tomato, and a variety of store-bought beauty creams, which – however carefully combined – don't seem to help Min's flaking skin.

Both Min's skin condition and the medical world beset by superstitions call to mind Tsai Ming-liang's films, in particular 1997's River, in which regular Tsai protagonist Hsiao-kang – then close to Min's age – develops a strange, foreboding neck pain. (Speaking to me in an interview, Weerasethakul acknowledged Tsai as an influence, but added that he's also drawing from personal memories of his father's practice.) Still, Blissfully Yours ventures far beyond the doctor's office. Its centerpiece is a long drive to a remote jungle picnic spot that showcases one of the director's quirks: he places the opening credits, set to a perky pop samba, here, more than 45 minutes into the film.

When lovers Min and Roong find that hidden picnic spot, the visual splendor is panoramic, and Weerasethakul proves himself a fine director of actors, a master at capturing subtle shifts in mood, and an expert at hypnotically playing with the passage of time – the film itself feels like a trip to a secret world. Orn's sudden arrival after her own tête-à-tête in the woods annoys the younger Roong, and as she and Min try to steal a moment of sexual gratification, Orn silently weeps by the side of a stream. Having traveled to this Eden, all three characters find that their burdens are still beside them (ant invasions are the least of their problems). Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram) has risked her low-pay job – painting hundreds of Bugs Bunny figurines – for the adventure. Min (Min Oo) faces imminent deportation. And Orn (Jenjira Jansuda, a casting agent before landing the starring role she'd craved, is vividly peevish) finds herself ignored by friends, left alone with thoughts of a child she lost and others she can't have.

Though currently without a distributor, Blissfully Yours recently won the Best Undistributed Film category in the fourth annual Village Voice film critics' poll, and Mysterious Object is set to be released on DVD in the United States by Plexifilm this month. Founder of a pioneering independent Thai film and video collective called Kick the Machine – film theaters in Thailand are controlled by the country's major production companies – Weerasethakul has a third feature planned. On Kick the Machine's Web site, Tropical Malady is described as a "horror story [that] disguises a disturbing sexual political agenda." The plot involves two men, a jungle, and paranormal phenomena. Place the word "urban" in front of jungle, and it could be set in San Francisco. But chances are that Joe will be mapping more interesting territory.