Shedding mysterious skins, Tropical Malady lingers on.
By Johnny Ray Huston

BOTH TENDER MEMORY and transcendental meditation, Tropical Malady presents further proof that Thailand's Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul is the most unique feature filmmaker working today, a poet of the jungle to outdo Werner Herzog. Of course, that which makes him unique also confounds a percentage of viewers. The trick with Apichatpong's movies is to relinquish all expectations regarding tidy linear narratives that have persistent forward momentum – a tough task for Hollywood-trained and art-house audiences alike. Do so, and you'll be rewarded with an immersive experience unlike any other, one where (as the song goes) the evening breeze caresses the trees. By the end of Tropical Malady's languid, phantasmagoric descent into dark recesses, you'll swear the theater ceiling has sprouted vines.

Tropical Malady's first half charts the growth and stasis of a blossoming flirtation between muscular forest patrol soldier Keng (Sakda Kaewbuadee) and wild-toothed country boy Tong (Banlop Lomnoi), who has a job at an ice-cutting plant. This section is the closest Apichatpong has come to obeying the technical rules of slick contemporary filmmaking convention, and yet the strange fits and starts and lulling rhythms are very much his own, riddled with mysteries such as camerawork that occasionally creeps forward toward a particular resting place. As ardent Keng reaches out to Tong and Tong teasingly eludes his grasp, the mood and atmosphere are constantly on the verge of reverie. Music seems to materialize out of nowhere, and in Apichatpong's world, even an incidental techno track used for aerobics can take on a spiritual quality, telegraphing the racing heartbeats of a pair of potential lovers.

Guided by hut chats, moped rides, stick-shift driving lessons, and the gift of a Clash tape, Keng's courtship of Tong is prone to endearingly odd and spontaneous expressions of affection. Even in a common romantic setting such as a movie theater, the pair's physical relationship takes on a distinctive form, with Tong clasping his legs around one of Keng's furtive hands to trap it; when Keng suggests that their palms might form a royal barge of good fortune, Tong answers that they'd more likely resemble a boat for Keng to row. (The sensuality is strangely hand-centric, most memorably when Keng takes Tong's fingers in his mouth just after Tong has pissed near a roadside sign.) Apichatpong has a flair for allowing incidental quirks to invade his pictures, and this time they come from a pair of older sisters who befriend Keng and Tong. One attempts to tempt them with the "fresh bud" she's grown, while the other follows up a folktale about greed with contemporary evidence drawn from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

When the latter sister takes Keng and Tong on a tour of a cave – where they discover a kitschy temple that broadcasts an instrumental version of "God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen" – their abruptly aborted crawl into suffocating darkness foreshadows Tropical Malady's second half. There, a soldier, played by Kaewbuadee, chases a shaman whose tiger manifestation looks suspiciously like a naked Tong with stripes tattooed onto his slim frame. Apichatpong has likened his narrative to a pair of mirrors placed with their backs against one another. It's a vivid metaphor, but one that nonetheless lacks a corollary for the lulling, time-stretching dream states he explores. The soldier is surrounded by verdant greens and bird-and-insect symphonies that eventually give way to quieter blackness. He crosses paths with a baboon, whose chittering (translated into English subtitles!) provides counsel about whether he is hunter or prey. A tree glows, a ghost rises from a dead cow, and a mountainous horizon resembles a pair of bodies lying side by side.

Stories taken from Thai literature and folklore are the skins that Tropical Malady sheds on its way to a ravishing finale. As Chuck Stephens has noted in this newspaper, the tourist take on Thailand as a "land of smiles" is a stereotype that Apichatpong twists to his own devices, allowing characters to gaze directly at the camera with sly, slightly mocking, guile. Following in the footsteps of his 2002 feature Blissfully Yours, into the woods he goes, though this time his journey is infused with a mystic air. (An overt link between the two films can be found in the not-so-exquisite corpse discovered by soldiers at the beginning of Tropical Malady, a body that belonged to a Blissfully Yours character whose postcoital off-screen wandering was punctuated by the sound of gunfire.) Blissfully Yours's resplendent-then-oppressive sunshine gives way to darkness and nighttime; in the earlier film, the jungle was the site for a futile escape from societal prejudices, but here it's home to a mythical union.

Discussing Tropical Malady at a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening last fall, Apichatpong took time to note that he didn't consider it a "gay film," and certainly, judged by the marketing strictures that dominate that questionable genre, it hardly qualifies. That said, it would be difficult to interpret at least one half of the movie as anything other than a romance involving two male characters, and if the interpretation widens to contain both sections, Apichatpong's latest is indeed a gay film that simultaneously expands the boundaries of the term and, at heart, uncovers profound core insights about passion between two men. Two movies in one, Tropical Malady lingers on after the lights go up.

'Tropical Malady' opens Fri/15 at the Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, SF. (415) 267-4893; and Act 1 and 2, 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 464-5980. See Movie Clock for show times.