Tropical Malady Review
I don’t often indulge in ‘what if’s but I can’t help but wonder how the 2004 Cannes Film Festival would have played out if not for the fact that 2004 was an election year and George W. Bush so greatly disliked around the world. There’s no doubt in my mind that Fahrenheit 9/11 wouldn’t have had a sniff at the top prize were that the case as it’s simply not a particularly well constructed film, in which case much greater acclaim would have likely fallen on Chan Wook Park’s Old Boy and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, the winner of the 2004 Special Jury Prize. And deservedly so. We’ve been singing the praises of Old Boy pretty much from day one but I’ve just now had the chance to finally see Tropical Malady and … wow. Just wow. This is simply a fantastic film, the kind that doesn’t overwhelm while viewing but continues to grow and twist and take on new meanings as you get a little distance from it.
Though Tropical Malady was my first exposure to Weerasethakul I knew going in that his films tend to be gay-themed and that is also the case here. The film is divided into two halves that, on first look, appear quite different in terms of content but actually prove to have very strong links.
The film opens on a troop of Thai soldiers, a Forest Patrol platoon responsible for the safety of a remote region, who have just discovered the corpse of an unknown man in a grassy field. They bundle the body up and return it to the closest village for pick up by the police and are there fed dinner by a village family. Over the course of the meal Keng, one of the soldiers, is obviously smitten by Tong, the twenty something son of the soldier’s host family. The rest of this segment of the film is the story of Keng and Tong’s slowly growing relationship.
This whole section of the film plays out like a slowly unspooling memory, the story coming in spurts and bounds as fragments come forward out of linear sequence according to some strangely familiar inner logic. The pieces are tied together less by logic or plot than they are by emotional links. It’s a difficult way to tell a story but Weerasethakul makes it work beautifully. The story moves with a fluid grace, slowly building a quiet emotional resonance, and though trying to sort things out in a linear, factual sense early on could give you a major headache it all makes perfect sense by the time you reach the end. Or so you think.
A major factor in Weerasethakul’s success is his choice of what to show and what not. Where most film maker’s tend to track dialogue or plot Weerasethakul seems to want to track the emotional progression of a scene with his camera. Rather than cutting from speaker to speaker he will focus on one figure within the scene and just watch that character as they watch others and react to what’s going on around them. A key example of this is the early dinner scene. Though there is a full dialogue carrying through the scene what drives it are the shots of the soldier’s checking out the family’s daughter, Keng fixating upon Tong and Tong’s mother trying to sort out what’s actually happening around her.
As this segment of the film progressed I frequently had the feeling that Keng’s interest in Tong was somewhat predatory. Homosexuality is still a significantly taboo subject in Thailand and while the nature of Keng’s interest in Tong was obvious enough to the viewer it was never actually spoken aloud and Tong – a barely literate, low wage laborer – was presented as being both intellectually slow and emotionally naïve. The true nature of the relationship began to come out towards the end of Keng and Tong’s story and was thrown into an entirely new light by part two of the film.
The second half of the film is a modern retelling of an old Thai folk tale about a shape shifting shaman who was slain and became a roaming tiger-ghost. The story again revolves around Keng as livestock has begun to go missing from the local village. When frightened villagers discover a tiger paw print it is up to Keng to track the tiger through the jungle and kill it. It is, of course, the tiger-ghost shaman of the folk tale played by the same actor who played Tong. This is one of those classic ‘into the wild’ motifs, perhaps made most famous in the film world by Apocalypse Now … as Keng moves deeper and deeper into the jungle all the trappings of civilization are stripped away and he becomes his truest, most primal self. Just to make sure that neither Keng nor the audience misses the point Keng is eventually informed by some passing monkeys – the monkey dialogue presented in subtitled form – that it is actually he who is the prey, that the tiger has used his natural aggressiveness to lure him away from civilization and into the tiger’s natural territory.
There is less in the way of plot and technique to talk about here but this segment is no less fascinating for that. It functions both as a superbly well told story in its own right while also increasingly functioning as an allegory for what came before, casting all of your assumptions about what you viewed in the first half of the film into doubt and introducing an entirely new layer of complexity. And then there are the tantalizing hints that this section of the film is NOT meant to be taken as fantasy – that these events factually exist in the same world as the characters moved through in the first segment and have some direct plot links to what came before.
By the time Tropical Malady comes to close it has raised one batch of questions, seemingly answered them, subverted those earlier answers and left you with a complex, keenly observed look into human nature that leaves some significant puzzles for you to work out on your own. It’s potent stuff. The tendency with gay-themed film can be to relegate it into the ‘gay’ pile and assume that it is of no relevance or interest to the non-gay population. To do so here would be a huge mistake.
The excellent Thai DVD of Tropical Malady can be had cheap at EthaiCD.
