96. Tropical Malady (2004)
Another film at joint 95th on the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s tale of love and folklore is something truly special.
Welcome to the latest instalment of my journey through Sight & Sound’s Top 100 films of all time. You can read the rest of the series published so far here.
[Contains spoilers]
Like many great tales, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) centres on a pair of characters. But does so twice. It’s a movie split in two, a structural feature that mirrors the Janus-faced nature of human experience and storytelling. Adam and Eve. Orpheus and Eurydice. Romeo and Juliet. Holmes and Watson. Tango and Cash.
In its first half, the film unfolds as a languid romance between soldier, Keng, and villager, Tong. The narrative is discursive, dream-like, but still rooted in a formal realism. We get to see their courtship play out in discrete moments of affection as the pair circle each other’s otherness, caught between the city and the countryside.
Intriguing, what this says about human relations: how we use others as mirrors, as agents of affirmation, as continual reminders that we do in fact exist. And that’s just the ones we glance by. What we call ‘love’ only intensifies the situation.
All this is compelling enough, but then we’re hit with one of cinema’s most wildering cuts, pitching us into another realm altogether. One that often feels more like a horror movie. The two men still circle; but now we’re in the depths of the forest, and Keng (at least the actor playing him) is stalking the figure of Tong (same deal) transformed into a shamanic spirit, or weretiger.
Calling back to the Atsushi Nakajima quote that opens the film, the lines between man and animal dissolve in this lush landscape of ancient folklore and primal desire, posing even more questions about what it means to love another creature, and what it means to be human at all. But is ‘Keng’ hunting ‘Tong’, or is it the other way around?
What follows is a fever dream, as the jungle comes alive, manifesting lucent trees, talking monkeys, ghostly bovines, the man-tiger itself… mythical forms that persist in the human imagination despite the claims of quotidian life. And it glosses the bipartite nature of the film, the two worlds we’re presented with, still battling for dominion in our soul: ego vs. id, animal vs. human, civilisation vs. savagery, Eros vs. Thanatos.
“I’d hate to die without having loved,” Keng says to Tong during the first half, as they shelter together from a rainstorm. “You’re so sappy,” Tong replies, playfully. But the inscrutable pas de deaux of death and love is what’s at work here. Love is a forest filled with unearthly creatures poised to rip your heart from your chest and devour it whole. Monster, I give you my spirit, my flesh and my memories.
The truth is, I’m struggling to explain what a truly remarkable piece of filmmaking this really is. How the first half conjures something sweet and pure-hearted through the observational, almost passive, use of the camera; how the second enjoins us to heed the numinous, the otherworldly, and listen to the ancient, atavistic dark buried deep within our bodies.
Yes, language fails me, leaves me isolated, caught somewhere between these two realms, unable to grasp the essence of either. The best thing to do is just to watch the film yourself and then watch it again. For it needs that second viewing, if only to make sense of the first, if only to locate yourself in relation to your own duality, that intangible otherness that moves within us; that shadow; that rough, slouching beast.