I Love You Just the Way You Are, and Are Again (‘Tropical Malady,’ ‘Princess Raccoon’)

Life at .0207108 Frames Per Second:  Just finished what turned into a three-month project...  I watched Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady.

No, it’s not a three-month-long movie – it’s just shy of two hours – but every time I popped the disc into the DVD player it felt like the proverbial three-hour tour.  After missing its run at the IFC, and two runs at BAM, I’d put the acclaimed Thai flick at the top of my Netflix queue.  It arrived in the mail just before New Year’s.

I watched it yesterday.

Not that I hadn’t tried, before.  Four times.  But the thing was like a digital, pulsing cure for insomnia.  Hit play and wake up a few hours later to find the menu screen happily cycling through, taunting you to try again.  Every copy should come with a freshly brewed pot of coffee and a volunteer who’ll pat you on the back and give you an “Atta boy!” every five minutes.

Further incentive to avoid:  All I knew about the movie’s concept, going in, was that it was an experimental film involving a gay relationship, and that halfway through one of the lovers became a tiger.  Or something.  Oh, and there was this still:

Now don’t you want to see that?

I did want to see it, though.  I’d seen two of Weerasethakul’s films, before, and enjoyed Mysterious Object at Noon, a similarly slow-moving experiment in which the director built his film’s narrative by traveling through his country; he took the beginning of a story told in the first village along a route then had people in subsequent towns add to it.  Inevitably it didn’t resolve itself well, but the tale turned in on itself in interesting ways.  One town’s theater troupe decided to stage a presentation of the entire story, thus far.  Et cetera.  (The other movie, a transvestite superhero video called The Adventures of Iron Pussy was apparently shot as a joke – and is one.)

Malady had a lot of critical push behind it, too.  It won a Jury Prize at Cannes, the Cool Critics (i.e. J. Hoberman) liked it, and Everyone Who Wanted to Be Cool pretended to like it, too.  It wound up at #6 in the Voice’s Take 7 poll. 

Even if my initial urge had zzzzz’d out, it was now something that should be watched.  Ugh.  Embarrassed and tired of looking at the thing, I steeled myself and sat down to watch the fucker last night... and promptly fell asleep.  But fifty minutes later I woke up, re-caffeinated and re-steeled.  Y’know what?

It was actually worth the self-imposed wait.

*

Weerasethakul takes almost as much time to get to his movie as I have, here.  He opens on a group of army patrolmen in a meadow, posing for snaps around a naked corpse (a casualty, apparently, of the director’s last work, Blissfully Yours) and pitching long-distance woo to CB operators.  The film moves with all the narrative drive of a slight summer breeze; eventually the focus narrows to soldier Keng and rural resident Tong.  A sun-and-smiles romance begins between the two men.

Conflict-free and generally chaste, the first third of Malady ambles along aimlessly.  The director creates a safe place for his two characters.  Their relationship is allowed to exist without the burdens of explanation or plot or even dialogue.  There are no arguments, and sex is out of the question – because then there would be some sort of climax involved.

Sounds dull?  It is.

But suddenly – and confusingly – around the forty minute mark there’s a quick, dreamy transition.  The men seem to have separated – Keng’s unit is seen leaving the area – and Tong is seen alone, asleep.  He disappears in a dissolve, someone offscreen mentions something about a “monster” that’s been killing livestock, and Keng appears, feeling the bed for heat.

The lovers are now hunters.

The movie renames itself “A Spirit’s Path” and refashions itself as a mythic horror story using the same two actors; one’s a predatory, shape-shifting shaman, the other the jungle patrolman sent out to kill it.

This second section of Malady is actually longer and slower than the first, but it’s a thousand times more intense.  While there’s some suspense and at least the semblance of a storyline – ostensibly there’s a chase going on – the real impressive stuff is still divorced from any notion of plot.  There’s a primal power, here, a sense of magic and discovery.  The second part also has the benefit of context:  We’re forced to acknowledge that the two halves somehow form a whole.

It’s easy to see why certain critics went nuts for the film; just about everything Weerasethakul puts into the movie feels vague and haphazard.  It makes the movie easy to over-analyze (on the DVD commentary the director is joined by a very pleased-with-himself critic who gets huffy every time his ethereal interpretations are undermined by a very simple (and, usually, completely unrelated) explanation).  Quite frankly, much of the time it feels like the filmmaker lacks the ability to communicate some of his ideas.  The film still congeals, though, because he’s not manufacturing a strict a-b-c narrative; image and mood are the building blocks here, and Malady capitalizes on its randomness by occasionally blindsiding the viewer with supremely inspired moments.  By dropping only  a few simple effects into his languid work he keeps them special where in-your-face Hollywood CGI rollercoasters would smother the wonder right out.

And wonder of wonders,  the moments add up.  Ultimately, Weerasethakul seems to capture a love story without the story.  He frees the romance film from its meet-cutes and contrivances and melodrama.  He respects love and its contradictions, and honors it by approaching it from two entirely different directions.  The first part is postcard pretty, harmless, comfortable.  There’s companionship, understanding.  Physical interaction is barely pubescent – some playful grabbing, some prankish licking.  Holding hands.  The second part explores the fear two individuals face when they try to come together.  The inability to communicate, the fear of the loss of self, the fear of loneliness, the acknowledgement of an almost supernatural power beyond one’s control.  And all the amazement and unpredictability that comes with it.  When one man catches up with the other, they wordlessly tackle each other (“This is my second favorite sex scene in Thai cinema,” the critic says on the DVD; the filmmaker responds, “This is a sex scene?”).

These aren’t dualities, or a simple dialectic, but two collections of seemingly incongruent moods that messily come together into one impossibly hard-to-define emotion.  And Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ultimate accomplishment is that, when we are forced face-to-face with the beast, our stomachs drop.

*

And no, to those in the know, I still can’t use the word “proverbial” with a straight face.

*

Ziyi Zhang was in two of the best films of 2005, and neither one was Memoirs of a Geisha.  Princess Raccoon is the latest from expressionist director-slash-prankster-god Seijun Suzuki, and don’t listen to the haters:  By leaving behind his pistol operas to make a musical, the crime lord has created a masterpiece of whim. 

Raccoon had two whole public showings in New York last year (as part of the 2005 New York Asian Film Festival) and doesn’t appear to have found an American distributor.  Right now, you can’t even get a serviceable version on Canal Street; it’s only available on Region-2 DVD.  Luckily, the Voice has included the film as part of  Best of 2005 series at BAM; there are three showings on Sunday, April 23rd (advance tix can be purchased here).

In 16th-century Japan a vain emperor, wishing to be “fairest in the land,” banishes his good-looking son to a mountain wilderness.  There the son meets and falls in love with a shape-shifting princess (Zhang).  Her people are upset by the interspecies romance and imprison him; his father, unsatisfied by the banishment, declares war on them.

The plot adheres to timeworn folkloric tradition... but sticks to little else.  For a while, almost everything seems random:  Characters wander over theatrical sets and are green-screened into 2-D pencil drawings while rapping, tap-dancing, and interacting with rubber squeak toys.  But its embrace of artifice and its adoration of the illogical are parts of the plan:  Love, the raccoon princess points out, often doesn’t make sense at all.

It’s a movie alive with possibilities, a film where jump-cuts are characters and hand-to-hand combat boils down to rock/paper/scissors.  As the music wanders from traditional Japanese songcraft to hip-hop to... oh my god, is that ska? – the movie crosses every T it can find, Motts every Hoople.  There are no consistencies.

It’s an awful lot of fun, and I’ve been waiting to see it again for months.

*

Although the Sundance at BAM program is the one getting all the attention, the movie I’m dying to see for the first time is part of that same Voice series:  Joe Dante’s made-for-cable post-Iraq zombie flick “Homecoming;” it’s showing on April 13th in a double-feature with Romero’s Land of the Dead.  I’ve seen the latter before, but am actually looking forward to squirming though its acquired post-Katrina relevancy.

Other highlights include:  The Wayward Cloud, a Tsai Ming-Liang film I might actually be able to sit through (Goodbye, Deep Throat?), and an advance screening (how this qualifies as “Best of 2005” eludes me, but whatever) of Andrew (“Funny Ha Ha”) Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation – starring Brooklyn band Bishop Allen’s Justin Rice (as – ha, ha – “Allen”).

One more bit of happy news:  Three Times, the only Hou Hsiao-Hsien film I’ve watched and wanted to see again, is showing only a single time at BAM... because it’s opening at the IFC Center the following week.  Hooray.  A trilogy of love stories starring the same actors – my, that makes it sound like a cross between Malady and 2046 – it takes place during three periods of Taiwanese history.  The opening segment (1966) is corny and romantic, the second (1911) is initially dull but ultimately heartbreaking, the third (2005) is exhilarating and confusing.  It’s up there with the Wong Kar-Wai as one of the best-looking movies from last year (it screened here as part of last year’s New York Film Festival), and is worth seeing it on the big screen for one amazing shot of a hallway.

*

Tragedy:  Dave Kehr on how the U.S. strong-armed South Korea into lowering the quota system that has led to that country’s filmmaking boom.

Horror:  Matt Zoller Seitz, who serves as a film critic for the NY Press and a television critic for The Star-Ledger also keeps a blog (along with, I’m guessing, a cocaine habit)... and keeps it the way it should be kept:  When D/FW Star-Telegram critic Christopher Kelly boldly published an article embracing the current batch of sadistic horror fare (Wolf Creek, Hostel, Final Destination), Seitz got Kelly to debate the issue with his readers.

tags: tropical malady  bam  brooklyn academy of music  village voice  apichatpong weerasethakul  movie reviews  ziyi zhang  bishop allen  princess raccoon  seijun suzuki  

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