#banlop lomnoi

[addictivecontradiction]

Sud pralad, 2004

[moviesiveseenandwanttoremember]

Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s “สัตว์ประหลาด” (Tropical Malady) June 24, 2004.

[byneddiedingo]

Sakda Kaewbuadee and Banlop Lomnoi in Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

Cast: Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee. Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Cinematography: Jarin Pengpanitch, Vichit Tanapanitch, Jean-Louis Vialard. Production design: Akekarat Homlaor. Film editing: Lee Chatametikool, Jacopo Quadri.

Tropical Malady comes in two not-quite-discrete segments. The first is a more-or-less realistic account of the romance of Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), a soldier, with Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), a farm boy Keng meets during a mission to recover a body. The second part is an elaboration on a kind of ghost story in which a soldier (also played by Lomnoi) goes into the jungle to search for a missing villager, and there encounters the spirit of a shaman (also played by Kaewbuadee) who can turn himself into a tiger. Although the first part is mostly a love story, it is as shadowy in its way as the second part, beginning with the discover of the body -- and the soldiers' glee in having their photographs taken with the corpse -- and ending with Tong's disappearance into the dark, after which Keng rides his motor scooter past a group of men beating up another man and then pursuing Keng. Although the narrative of Tropical Malady is more conventionally handled than that of Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), there are some clear links between the two films, including the fact that Kaewbuadee plays a character named Tong in both, and in Tropical Malady refers to his uncle who can recall his past lives. There's also a key scene in both films set in a cavern, along with an obvious preoccupation with the spirit world. If there's a theme that runs through both, it's that of the thinness of the boundary between civilization and the primitive world, or between body and spirit.

[ourlittlesister2015]

Well. At least we'll always have Lee Kang-sheng's eyes

[senso1954]

สัตว์ประหลาด tropical malady (2004), dir. apichatpong weerasethakul

[pierppasolini]

Tropical Malady (2004) // dir. Apichatpong Weerasethaku

[beautifilms]

Tropical Malady (2004) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

[dare-g]

Tropical Malady (2004)

[shattereddteacup]

Cemetery of Splendor (2015)

Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Language: Thai

[guysonfilms]

Banlop Lomnoi and  Sakda Kaewbuadee (Sud Pralad, 2004)

[hiddenbyleaves]

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

[addictivecontradiction]

Sud pralad, 2004

[moviemosaics]

Cemetery of Splendour

directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015

[byneddiedingo]

Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)

Cast: Jenjira Pongpas, Banlop Lomnoi, Jarinpatta Rueangram, Petcharat Chaiburi, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw, Bhattaratorn Senkraigul, Richard Abramson. Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Cinematography: Diego Garcia. Art direction: Pichan Muangduang. Film editing: Lee Chatametikool.

I feel handicapped by my ignorance of Southeast Asian history and culture when I watch Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. I can appreciate them aesthetically but there are layers of significance hidden to me. Yet the more I watch his films, the more they draw me in, the more they linger in my thoughts, even stray ones when I'm not specifically concerned with trying to comprehend a particular film. His long takes, often with the key characters in the middle distance rather than in closeup, allow things to stray into the frame, the way a hen and her chickens do at one moment in . They allow the eye to wander, and to wonder at the details of setting. In another filmmaker these would be distractions, but since Weerasethakul is not urgently concerned with telling a story, the distractions provide texture and surprise. We Westerners are not used to films that force us to contemplate -- I don't think any filmmaker since the art-house heyday of Antonioni and Resnais has so carefully taken the time to give us extended contemplative moments as Weerasethakul does. Is it, I sometimes wonder, the "exotic" quality of his settings that keeps us from boredom as we watch scenes in which nothing much happens?  But enough does happen in Cemetery of Splendor that I'm driven to keep watching and waiting for a theme or even a mood to resolve itself. Sometimes the things that do happen seem gratuitous, as when we watch a group of people in a park by a lake begin to swap places, moving from one bench to another, as in a dance or a game with no discernible rules. Sometimes they're strikingly beautiful, as in the slow dissolve from an Escher-like intersection of escalators to the light poles that stand beside the beds in the hospital. There is a wizardry in Cemetery of Splendor that gives it magic. But then I read that the film is in some ways a commentary on the politics of Thailand, and I'm brought up short by my own ignorance.

[superangrycollection]

[maxwelltait]

Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul, 2004)