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Tropical Malady
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring: Sakda Kaewbuadee, Banlop Lomnoi, Sirivech Jareonchon, Udom Promma
Script: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Original Title: Sud Pralad
Running Time: 1:58
Country: Thaïlande
Year: 2004
Official Site: Tropical Malady
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"Tropical Malady translates my attraction for virgin landscapes and mysteries. It's a song of love and obscurity." Through this luminous formula, Apichatpong Weerasethakul defines the most beautiful film he has given us. Noticed in 2002 with the intriguing Blissfully Yours, the Thai director explores an "in-between" world, confronts the human soul with its dark side and delivers a troubling tale haunted by ghosts. As experimental as his previous full-length film, Tropical Malady is composed of two distinct films in which one is the negative of the other.
In the first naturalist part, with sensitive touches, the director tells the story of a burgeoning idyll between two men. Their passion, modest and intense at the same time, unfurls in a diurnal segment, lit by soft and sensual light. The lovers walk together, play video games, go to the movies. In short, they live the carefree life of two young people who've been won over by the incandescence of desire. If there's a disease here, it's contagious love. The director avoids dramatization to the advantage of simple and endearing sequences. At the height of their feelings, one of the two men disappears in the jungle.
The second part—a legendary account—is set in motion after one hour of a tender and radiant story. This rupture intervenes with the caesura of a symmetrically built poem/film. Apichatpong Weerasethakul disconcerts, while launching new credits, what would almost authorize apprehending Tropical Malady as two autonomous films. An assumption refuted by a subtle play of echoes and correspondences between the two segments, where one fertilizes the other. Thus, at the time of their last rendez-vous, the boys lick each other's hands, in order to prefigure the animal regression in the second half of the film. In the same way, the character takes leave of his lover to disappear in one eternal night. Darkness contaminates the frame during all the second part of this voyage, in the confines of dream and terror.
Boards accompany the Khmer fairy tale that narrates the meeting between a tiger and a park ranger, who's left in search of his lover: "Whereas the tiger tries to insinuate himself in the soldier's dreams, he dreams of missing villagers". This recourse to boards finds resonance in the silent films to which Weerasethakul pays homage in an original way. The language, a place of the civilized, evaporates to the benefit of an incursion into the primitive. This part is entitled "the way of the spirit" and effectively addresses itself to the unconscious, while the first hour is more visual and figurative.
The jungle, a character totally apart, absorbs the hero, surrounding him with its troubling presence and brings to light his sick soul. This scenery sets up a pathogenic climate that is articulated with the idea of animal regression. The soldier tracks the tiger and doesn't take long to perceive that, above all, he is the prey. Darkness absorbs the borders and plunges the hero into an undifferentiated world, filled with phantoms. The tiger takes on the physical appearance of the old lover. In the end, the soldier's quest proves to be totally reflexive. His meeting with the phantom tiger, with whom he communicates by spirit, carries the audience in a hypnotic trance.
Tropical Malady, a film suffocating with beauty, is located beyond traditional cinematographic semantics and explores unknown regions. The film invents a secret language, establishes an intimate dialogue with the supernatural. The director's genius bursts onto this dazzling film that opens the way to new possible narratives. In his films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a major figure of the experimental Thai scene, writes the word "desire" at every moment.
Sandrine Marques
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
 Uncle Boonmee review
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Tropical Malady
