Thai Auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul: A Slow Indescribable Challenge Worth Taking On

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Joe as he’s known by Westerners, is the most important figure in the history of Thai cinema, and for many, myself included, the only exposure to the country’s cinematic output at all. Yet Weerasethakul is not only famous for bringing Thai films to international audiences, but is also possibly the most prominent figure of experimental, ‘slow cinema’ currently working. Slow cinema is an aesthetic style that opposes itself stylistically in almost every way to the narrative Hollywood structures we as audiences are most accustomed to. It features long takes of redundant, everyday tasks, unanimated performances, and a pace that challenges our ever shrinking attention span. Other directors who fall into the category are Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and directors previously written about on this very blog like Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Chantal Akerman, and Theo Angelopoulos. While these directors’ collective filmographies share the unhurried pacing that challenge modern audiences, they all differ greatly in a variety of ways from themes to content to levels of realism and surrealism, and certainly Weerasethakul’s rural Thai set films represent a part of the world that has gone almost completely unnoticed by international cinema watchers.

It would be easy to find Weerasethakuls’ films impenetrable and pretentious. Watching them is to undergo a unique experience that can feel spiritual, puzzling, magical, and stimulating in a subconscious, dream inducing way that does not have to be infuriating if you are willing to give yourself into them. In the following essay I will try to analyze several of his films, a task that I have found much more difficult than usual, and what I conclude is much more subjective than what can be concluded when watching other more straight forward films. Each viewer should enter Weerasethakul’s world with an open mind, and if they do, they are sure come out with a diverse range of questions and readings that may or may not aline with my own.

Weerasethakul’s films are deeply rooted in a Buddhist tradition and often feature monks, oral legends, reincarnation, past lives, and the souls, deaths, and relationships of humans, animals, and nature alike. The director stated, “I feel that meditation and cinema have a big connection. When you observe time, you observe your body; you can feel these metaphysical layers.” Perhaps viewers practiced in meditation will have an easier job of getting into Weerasethakul’s cinema. For those of us who have never attempted it, watching his films can be an interesting introduction. One certainly experiences time differently while watching his films. There is very little sense of entertainment, at least not the same entertainment experienced when watching a film by the Coen Brothers, Kurosawa, or Almodóvar. Instead you enter in a trance where the images and sounds wash over you. I have to watch Weerasethakul’s films more than once because they always put me in a dream-like state where the visual and audio experience forces me inward and I often lose track of the action occurring in the film. I’m not sure if this is Weerasethakul’s intention, but the more I watch his films, the better I get at staying with them and developing interpretations of them. It certainly is not easy to keep up with his films, even when compared to others you see even at an art house cinema. He asks for another level of audience patience and collaboration.

Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady was the film that shot him to art house fame. A film that either baffled, bored, or enthralled viewers, it was sure to generate a strong response whether positive or negative. A documentary style flat aesthetic prepares our mind for a social realist film about Thai life in the countryside. Yet very soon it becomes clear that we have to pay close attention to follow the quiet film which smoothly creates a visual space and tells a story through sounds, framing, and editing that goes unnoticed if you are only paying attention to the dialogue. The film feels even more impenetrable as it goes on and symbolism and surrealism run rampant. Though ‘run’ perhaps is not the right word given the film’s pacing which is extremely slow, and a filmgoer who gets too comfortable in his or her seat and sits back to simply consume cinema is sure to be completely lost or fall asleep, and even if you walk into the cinema prepared for the daunting experimentalism either of these incidents could easily occur. To top it all off, the film is split into two parts, both featuring the same lead actors, but exactly how these two halves of the film are related, if they are related at all, is in the spectators’ hands. 

The first part is the gradual story of a tender if undramatic tale of first love between two young men, Keng, an attractive, confident soldier, and Tong, a shy ice factory worker who lives with his family near where Keng is stationed. While easier to follow than its accompanying half, nothing is given freely nor explicitly to the audience. It opens with soldiers who come upon a dead body and take pictures with it before wrapping it up and taking it with them. This strange action goes unjudged by Weerasethakul. It is unclear what we are meant to think of it. Should we be scandalized by the soldiers’ actions? Or is it another example of the director’s casual depiction of death as nothing more than another stage in human existence? It is hard to tell. We are then taken to Tong’s home where Keng eats with his family. The two silently exchange glances as Tong’s mother observes them. Then Tong goes to take a shower with a child, supposedly a younger sibling. The camera cuts to Keng who stares at the lens for several minutes as the opening credits roll. He smiles and muses at us, or is he looking at Tong? We never get a reverse shot to confirm what he is looking at.

What follows are scenes depicting the development of the men’s friendship. Their legs touching each other with desire in the cinema as they playfully grope and resist each other, Keng placing his head in Tong’s lap as they watch a rainstorm, Tong accompanying a singer on stage to sing a pop song as Keng beamingly watches them. Just as they share their most intimate moment, a moment the audience has been waiting for that would seemingly take their relationship to another more serious level and bring the action to more intense romantic heights by taking each other’s hands to their mouths, Tong disappears into the darkness in a wonderfully metaphorical shot. Then, soon after, the film cuts to black and we realize that Keng and Tong’s story has finished, and we are in for another, much less conventional treat.

While the first story is anything but conventional, the second part takes us into a deeply allegorical, spiritual territory, completely separated from mainstream storytelling and sure to try the patience of audiences who are not willing, or not practiced, in film viewing as a collaborative experience between an artist and his public. There is no actual dialogue, and I must admit that the two times I saw the film I struggled to stay awake. The soundtrack of the jungle: the cicadas, the leaves, and the wind overtake the film to create a profoundly natural yet otherworldly audio space. The majority of the run time we watch Keng walk and stalk through the deep green, savage jungle yet we also see a talking monkey, the ghost of a cow, and an illuminated tree. It features the same two actors, but we are never specifically told if they are representing the same characters, or symbolic versions of those that appear in the first story. While we are given absolutely no explicit help as to how to interpret either part of the film, a likely reading is that the second part depicts the emotions felt by the two men in a figurative way. It is about a soldier who is tasked with tracking down a shaman who has been possessed by a tiger spirit. Keng, the hunter, is also in a way a hunter in the first part of the film. He is the one that pursues Tong, who makes the first moves, whose advances move the romance forward. Tong is more resistant in the first part, gently resisting or accepting Keng’s advances but without giving into them wholly. Here he is running naked through the forest, seemingly rageful or in pain, his body lined with tiger-like stripes. Their roles here could identify their roles in the homosexual community. Keng is clearly comfortable with his sexuality, and we are subtly shown that he has had several partners through his conversation with a man in a urinal and his wordless exchange with an aerobics trainer. Tong, on the other hand, seems reluctant to accept his identity. 

Despite this, at the end of each part, it is Tong who makes a more aggressive gesture, be it sexual, violent, or spiritual gesture. In part one, Keng kisses Tong’s hand after he exits the bathroom, then Tong takes Keng’s and not only kisses it, but licks and bites it. At the beginning of the film Weerasethakul quotes novelist Ton Nakajima: “All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check, and even teach them to perform tasks alien to their bestiality.” Yet to me it seems that it is our human protagonists who are learning by embracing their animal instincts in the film. At the end of the second part, the shaman (Tong?) appears in animal form as a ferocious, awe inspiring tiger, imposing and violently terrifying, yet regal and sublime at the same time. It is the tiger who devours Keng, who willingly lets himself be taken. Yet this process is not bloody, but spiritual, as exemplified by a painting of a tiger perched on a tree seemingly sucking the soul of a man by way of a silver string that unites both. Our animal desire to sexually possess others, paired with the human need for love and companionship is what makes human relationships so simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Who is to say that the body we see at the beginning of the film is not Keng, who leaves his human form to join his lover in one glowing, powerful existence. 

Tropical Malady won the Cannes Jury Prize the year it was released, and Weerasethakul would go on to win the coveted Palme d’Or six years later with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives. It has the same unshowy style as his other films, then, suddenly, nonchalantly mixes surreal elements into the frame. The film is about Boonmee, a man dying of kidney failure who is spending his last days on his farm with his sister in law, Jen, nephew Tong, and his Laoitian assistant Jaai. He is talking with them after eating dinner when suddenly the figure of his deceased wife fades in. Instead of astonished reaction shots the camera stays still and the characters remain calm. They chat with her ghost as they would with an old friend. Later Boonmee’s disappeared son appears as well, but not in human form, instead as a giant red eyed monkey man. Recalling the ending of Tropical Malady, he claims he got lost looking to photograph a Monkey Ghost, and when he found it and mated with it he was turned into one himself. The actors' steady, unemotional line reading combined with the otherworldly occurrences on screen and a soundtrack that is overpowered with the natural nightly jungle sounds of insects create the strange meditative space that Weerasethakul is known for. 

The middle of the film is suddenly interrupted by the beautiful recreation of a folktale of a deformed princess being transported through the jungle carried by her servants. She stops near a waterfall that lands into a crystalline pond and looks at her reflection where she sees her scars have disappeared. One of her servants comes to her and kisses her. She asks him why he closed his eyes and accuses him of pretending he was kissing her reflection. He leaves her as she weeps, and then, suddenly, a catfish speaks to her, complimenting her on her beauty. She walks into the water and throws her jewelry into the pond as an offering to make her beautiful. The catfish then proceeds to pleasure her under the water, its tail vigorously flapping near the surface of the water as the princess quietly moans with delight. The scene ends with a long take of the catfish swimming underwater as jewelry sinks to the bottom of the pond. The scene ends there. Did the princess get her wish? Or did the catfish give her something greater by making love to her? We will never know. The diversion from the main story to the land of oral stories and legends brought to life is also present in Tropical Malady when a woman unannounced interrupts our two star crossed lovers to tell them a story about two brothers who were told to collect rocks from a river that would make them rich, but whose greed doomed their riches.

When we come back to the main story Boonmee is talking with his wife and contemplates the reason for his illness, believing it to be karma for killing communists as a soldier when he was young, or for killing too many insects on his farm. She then proceeds to accompany him in his death by leading him to a cave with Jen and Tong. The cave serves as a passageway to death as the four characters traverse the cave in a series of beautiful shots, some still, some handheld, before Boonmee’s wife removes his catheter and he passes away, ready to embark on his next life.

The final scene sees Tong escape from a temple where he is becoming a monk. He goes to see his mother in a hotel room who is watching television with who could be assumed to be her daughter and Tong’s sister. Tong seems disenchanted with the repressed, spiritual life at the temple and longs for the comforts of a shower, which he duly takes, and city life in general. After his shower he and Jen leave the hotel to go get dinner, yet another Jen also remains with her daughter as the two continue to mindlessly watch television, as if we were seeing alternative realities. It is difficult to interpret this last scene, but after so many metaphysical scenes, this seems to critique modern society, where we are consumed by bad television programs, and even monks are unable to disconnect from modern temptations. Weerasethakul’s films are subtly political, and often feature soldiers. Boonmee’s own dystopian dream of a future dominated by soldiers and his own guilt for past military actions portray a country where it is impossible to escape the influence of the army, even in its most rural outreaches. Capitalism is also clearly present in his films where neon lights, plastic figures, and pop music penetrate sacred settings like temples and funerals. While it would be more visually pleasing to film these spaces by cutting out these modern eye sores that seek to sell us stuff, Weerasethakul’s camera displays them in all their tastelessness. 

Between these prize winning chapters in his career, Weerasethakul made another acclaimed film titled Symptoms of a Century that would go on to make headlines for being banned in his native Thailand. After seeing the film it is incredible to think it would be considered controversial, as the actions the government took offense to include doctors drinking on the job, doctors engaged in making out, and monks doing everyday activities like playing with a remote control frisbee and playing the guitar. Yet anyone who knows Weerasethakul, knows that the action in his film can be described as anything but scandalous (maybe with the exception of the fish sex). This just goes to show how strict the Thai government can be on filmmakers, even when they are as internationally respected as Weerasethakul is.

The film itself is just as enigmatic as his other efforts, and like the stories in Tropical Malady or the section of the princess in Uncle Boonmee, many narrative strands vanish without a trace before coming to a conclusion. Like Ana in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, lovers disappear, never to resurface, and Weerasethakul takes it even further, leaving entire character stories and whole time periods left unexplained and unfinished. Antonioli was a pioneer of this type of new cinema, but Weerasethakul takes it to new, even less understandable heights. Symptoms of a Century, like Tropical Malady, is split into two parts with the same actors appearing in both, yet here we get no title screens to make it clear to us that the change has taken place. The first half is set in a rural hospital a few decades in the past, and the second is set in a military hospital in the city in the present. We see the same, or very nearly the same scenes play out in both sections, including the interview of a new doctor, a buddhist monk’s attempt to get extra prescriptions, a session of aerobics, and another monk’s visit to a dentist. While some aspects remain the same over time, the environment changes greatly, and as the camera looks out upon the expansive green fields instead of accompanying a doctor on a tour of the facility in the first part, the second half is filled with eerie shots of the camera panning across white corridors, windowed hallways, and bright clean rooms full of machinery.

Yet what is most disconcerting about the film is the lack of finality to the various romantic couples we are introduced to. A young man opens his heart to another doctor. She in turn tells him a story about a man she was in love with, but never finishes it. The dentist-musician and the monk from the first story seem to be embarking on a flirtatious relationship when the monk is called away. He asks the dentist to follow him, but he loses him in the dark. It is at this point when we move to the future. In the last segment the new doctor has a visit from his girlfriend. They passionately kiss, but their future is uncertain when she asks him to relocate. We are programmed to want a resolution to these loose ends, but Weerasethakul could not be less interested in giving them to us. The film is not as interested in telling us a story, as it is in bringing us to a visual place where things happen and disappear like smoke, elusive and impossible to pin down.

Due in large part to Weerasethakuls’ problems with the Thai government, coupled with his friendship with screen legend Tilda Swinton, Weerasethakul decided to make his next film with the thespian in Colombia. Swinton, who on various occasions has said she believes the performance of the donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar to be the greatest of all time, was ecstatic to jump at the opportunity to work with a director whose actors’ performances are as minimalist, and very much farm animal like as possible. Weerasethakul making a film outside his native Thailand at first sounds like a strange idea, but it is amazing how good of a fit his South East Asian themes are with the Latin American country. The lush green jungle of Thailand here is exchanged for the Amazon forest, and his surreal, mystical images are perfectly at home in the country that so embraced magical realism. The spiritual doctor advice here is exchanged for a pamphlet of Jesus, yet there is a pervading superstition throughout the film that is akin to the ideas of karma and reincarnation in his previous films. Swinton’s sister is in the hospital and she and husband’s ideas on the cause range from a sort of karma for not taking care of a dog she saw get run over, or because of her work on a hidden tribe in the rainforest that sends out curses to prevent outsiders from disturbing them.

The film’s plot, if it can be said to have a plot, revolves around Swinton’s search for the origin of a loud booming noise she erratically hears inside her head. The noise cannot be heard by anyone else, and, because of it, she is unable to sleep at all. During her search she runs across two Hernans. One is an attractive young man who works as a sound engineer and helps her replicate the sound she hears using his mixing table. The two take up a somewhat flirtatious relationship, yet suddenly, Hernan disappears, and not only does he not resurface, but it seems that he never even existed in the first place. Looking at how this friendly, platonic relationship concludes and looking back at others both platonic and sexual relationships in Weerasethakuls’ other films, it seems that disappearance is a key recurring element, and that true love only persists for a brief, fleeting moment before hopes of its continuance are completely dashed. The second Hernan is an older man who lives in the forest scaling fish. He does not have a television or computer, but instead can read the stories that the rocks around him tell. The final scenes of the film bring Swinton closer to the answer of her mystery sound by once again looking at time as nonlinear, by connecting the history of humankind and nature and past, present, and future. The idea that the reasons for why inexplicable things happen to us can be answered by looking for traces in the past or future is present in all of his films, and here taken to an extreme level that even ventures into the realm of science fiction.

Memoria has been another slow cinema success for the auteur, and whether he makes his next film in Colombia, Thailand, or elsewhere, he is sure to find an eager home for it. Though a difficult sell to your average audience, Weerasethakul has now reached a status in the international community that guarantees his career. Inside his still, calm, silent, and strange frames, one sees the vision of someone looking as profoundly as he can for a way to explain who we are, where we come from, and where we have arrived to today as a human species. It is no small feat, and perhaps for this reason, he provides us with no simple answers.