By Chuck Stephens

THE CLICHÉ one typically first encounters about Thailand, especially if the pages of the Lonely Planet are your introductory text, is that the country is often referred to as the "Land of Smiles." Thai people, we're often told, are friendly and welcoming, given less to work than to pleasure and play, and extremely service-oriented toward tourists, sometimes to a degree that sets off various moral alarms. But as some seasoned globe-trotters who've stayed a bit too long in Thailand never seem to tire of telling whomever will listen, the bitter flip side of that first cliché is the way those bright and blinding smiles have a nasty habit of burning out, usually after your final visit to a Bangkok ATM climaxes with a message including the words "transaction declined, insufficient funds."

Of course, this extremely cynical sort of "wisdom" about modern Siamese hospitality is just as hoary a cliché as the first, though both have a certain basis in truth. It's not that Thais aren't entirely sympathetic to the adage, coined by Benjamin Franklin, that "fish and visitors stink after three days"; they've just developed a somewhat higher tolerance for what might elsewhere constitute already-spoiled goods. And they really do smile a lot, even if, as often as not, they're doing so as a way of avoiding conflict or covering up confusion, rather than as an invitation for pontificating expats to linger on their bar stools more than a minute beyond their visa's expiration date.

What the Janus-faced dialectic of these attitudes toward Thailand have to do with Tropical Malady – the astonishing and Cannes award-winning new feature by director Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' artist in residence this week – is neither clear-cut nor entirely mysterious, though it's a connection that seems as evocative and elusive as the movie itself. Structured as two visually and emotionally distinctive if narratively and thematically interlinked halves, Tropical Malady evolves from frictions between the real and the hallucinated and pits initially welcoming smiles and constant playfulness against irrational desires and overwhelming dread. The film's first half consists of an extremely sunny and lighthearted, if slightly discombobulated, portrait of the romance that develops between Keng a soldier on temporary leave from his regular station patrolling a dense Thai forest, and Tong, a fresh-faced country boy who inexplicably walks off into the night just as the affair is heating up and the film has reached its one-hour mark. In the weave of folkloric phantasms and ongoing psychic schisms that make up Tropical Malady's second half, the smiles of the first are swallowed by the night when Keng finds himself alone and back in the jungle, tracking a mysterious animal that's believed to be devouring local livestock.

Given that Keng is also attempting to come to grips with the hole Tong left in his heart, one might expect the companionship of the film's first half will give way to isolated loneliness in the second – but that expectation dissolves with the arrival of a talking monkey, a glowing tree that emits otherworldly bleeps and static buzz, the pale poltergeist that rises up and wanders off from the carcass of a cow, and a panting and enormous tiger that seems to be stalking Keng and projecting its thoughts directly into the increasingly addled soldier's head. Dissolved as well are any suspicions that, even with Strand Releasing distributing the film across the United States, Tropical Malady – whose Thai title is Sat Pralat, which can be translated as simply as "monster" or as ambiguously as "shape-shifter" – might turn out to be anything like your average boy-meets-boy romance. As Apichatpong's admiring critics and fans have been pointing out for quite a while now, it's precisely the significant absence of anything average or expected that makes the work of this extremely talented visionary seem so startlingly new.

In weird fusions of fiction and documentary like his Buddhist-surrealist meditation on storytelling, Mysterious Object at Noon, and the rash-infected erotic idyll Blissfully Yours, as well as in an ongoing series of gallery-bound videotapes such as a ruralized rethink of snooty urban soap operas, Haunted Houses, Apichatpong is almost single-handedly inventing modern Thai independent and experimental cinema, even if he's better known in France than among multiplex audiences in Bangkok, who've only just begun to understand and embrace their controversial native son. Much like Tropical Malady itself, Apichatpong is a world-class shape-shifter – a filmmaker and film-shaker who manages to be many things all at once, even if there's one thing he'll never be at all: an ordinary Joe.

Bay Guardian: In the press notes for Tropical Malady, you write that in the film's first half, "times are happy and love is uncomplicated for young soldier Keng and country boy Tong." Given the never-ending smiles and complete family and social acceptance that seem to envelop them, are you really suggesting that love between two men is typically unproblematic in Thailand? That scarcely seems likely, given that, contrary to certain erroneous international assumptions, it's far from "the truth." Or is it that, in the same way we tend to idealize our memories, particularly of the loved ones we've lost, there's something else going on?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: After the movie is over, I want audiences to ask themselves about which part of the movie is real or fantasy, or how real folktales and memories might be. As I always say, one part of the film cannot exist without the other; when you look at one part only, it becomes meaningless. Even though the first part is presented quite casually and sometimes in an almost documentary manner, as you've sensed here, something is not quite right about the people and the environment that these two guys seem to be living in.

BG: Can you comment on the film's Thai title, Sat Pralat?

AW: It's a term that's often used by kids to describe a monster in cartoons, a monster movie that can't be taken seriously, or old-style tales read by and to kids.

BG: The idea of a human who takes on the shape of a tiger in the woods comes up in your first film, Mysterious Object at Noon, when some schoolchildren bring up a "witch-tiger" they'd read about or seen in a cartoon. In Tropical Malady, the first appearance of a human turned tiger is also in the form of a woman. I know there have been several Thai films that contain tiger-women, most recently Bhandit Rittikol's Tigress of King River. How does such an entity function for you?

AW: It is a typical folktale that exists in most parts of the world. From my recent visit to the Pusan film festival, I know they have this tale in Korea as well. For me, I just like tigers because they are considered the king of the jungle, especially in this region of the world. In that way, the tiger is connected with the soldier, who's also an authority figure, and another kind of king – especially in certain gay stereotypes and fantasies about men in uniforms. So these are two beautiful beasts we are talking about.

BG: All of your films seem to have certain continuities from one to the next. Tropical Malady opens with soldiers discovering a dead man's body at the edge of a forest; this man might be the guy from Blissfully Yours whose motorcycle was stolen while he was making love to the older woman, Orn. What are these connections all about?

AW: If you watch closely, Orn also mentioned a soldier named Keng in Blissfully Yours. These details are, for me, about the continuity of time in my own life. It's as if my films are like mini-diaries of my recollections of certain things and events and I feel the need to assemble them on some kind of timeline. In my future work, you'll see these characters get older with me.

BG: Tropical Malady contains scattered references to folktales and literature. Few non-Thai audience members will know who Noi Inthanon is – can you fill us in?

AW: Noi Inthanon is a respected novelist who is most well-known for his jungle adventure stories. They're mainly journeys into various parts of Thai jungles by one guy from Bangkok, a sort of a hunter who has an old villager as a sidekick. I'm a big fan of this series. The words he uses describe the mood of the jungle – the fear, the beauty – very well. But it's not serious stuff, more like a boy's adventure story. It was made into a TV series, shot in 16mm in a studio, a long time ago, but I've never seen it.

BG: How does the story about Tong's dog going to the vet and Tong's discovery that it has stomach cancer relate to the rest of the film? Or is it merely a way to get in a visit to the doctor's office, which happens in all your movies?

AW: I had a dog who had cancer, and the situation was exactly like that, except that it happened during the day, and I had no boyfriend with me when I found out he was sick. This is one of the real events that I put in the film; another example is the scene at the pavilion with the older lady – the story she told, the trip to the cave and to her house later, and all the other little details are in the film just as they actually happened. More bits from my diary.

BG: Though you've mentioned the way many elements of the film are based on your own experiences, it seems you're mixing documentary and fiction less in Tropical Malady than in your earlier films.

AW: Actually, Tropical Malady is more interesting to me because of that – in the way that I re-created real events and mixed them with the actors' takes on those events. And I made sure there are scenes that reflect the "filmmaking process," like the awkwardness of the actors in front of the camera, particularly in the way they smile when they know the camera's on them and can't figure out what else to do.

BG: Are the two beautiful paintings that appear near the end of the film, one of a man-beast and one of an encounter between a tiger and a man, based on specific Buddhist paintings or illustrations?

AW: No, but I wanted them to suggest mural paintings in Thai temples. That's the way people used to tell stories, on a temple wall, because a sacred space was the last place they thought might get demolished; it seemed a cautious way to preserve memories. Another reason I used them is that, in the second part, to put it simply, the character goes back to nature – as if he's going back to a time when there was no civilization. The film's style needed to change to something ancient too, so I decided to use silent film techniques like intertitles and paintings to tell the story. I'm sometimes quite old-fashioned, and I don't think I'm really making a contemporary film here. I feel like it is a long time ago. I've also become more interested in Buddhism since my dad passed away, and in my next film about love, I'll probably move even more explicitly toward Brahman beliefs – particularly those involving karma and reincarnation.

'YBCA Presents Artist-in-Residence Apichatpong Weerasethakul,' copresented by San Francisco Cinematheque, the Film Arts Foundation, Frameline, NAATA, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, runs Nov. 5-7.

Blissfully Yours screens Nov. 5, 7 p.m.; Tropical Malady screens Nov. 6, 7 and 9:30 p.m.; and Mysterious Object at Noon screens Nov. 7, 2 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $5-$8. (415) 978-2787.