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A Sewer Rash, a River in Eden and a Stream of Tears
By Mahnola Dargis

In Blissfully Yours, a delicate, ethereal dream of a film from the young Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, two women and a man voyage into the wild, away from civilization and its discontents. Under a lush canopy of green, the travelers settle onto the bank of a small river for a modest picnic and some languid sex, cooling themselves in the lucent water and plunging into a parallel stream of tears. In this film, which opens today in Manhattan and marks the emergence of one of the more original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years, the primordial world offers only modest respite from everyday troubles.

The film begins with the two women, Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram) and Orn (Jenjira Jansuda), hovering next to the man, Min (Min Oo), in a doctor's examination room. Suffering from a rash that has covered his body in painful lesions, Min remains silent throughout the exam while the women speak on his behalf. We don't know yet that he's a Burmese migrant worker or perhaps in exile and is probably in Thailand illegally. What we do know is that the women are trying to get a work permit for him, but the doctor won't cooperate. Shot in the actual offices run by the filmmaker's doctor parents in the northeastern Thai city Khon Kaen, this opening exchange has a naturalistic awkwardness, with the actors crowding the frame with a palpable, almost comic sense of collective unease.

That unease gently dissipates as the story unfolds and the three main characters make their way into the forest. Because Mr. Weerasethakul isn't interested in conventional narrative, however, the story doesn't unfold in a linear, three-act fashion; rather, it leisurely zigs and zags, first to the factory where Roong painstakingly hand-paints Disney figurines until her hands ache, then to the office where Orn's husband works.

Although he pokes about the edges with a sharp, almost ethnographic eye, Mr. Weerasethakul doesn't linger in any of these places. We're there just long enough to catch a glimpse of normal everyday Thai life, as if the filmmaker wanted us to see these chilly institutions so that we can fully appreciate or at least intuit (Mr. Weerasethakul doesn't like to overstate his intentions) the importance of the coming idyll.

For Min, Roong and Orn, the trip into the forest will be no simple day in the country; it is something more urgent and necessary. What it means to each character emerges slowly through fragments of conversation rather than through speeches and scripted epiphanies. You don't need to know the political backdrop to understand or enjoy Blissfully Yours - the film's aesthetic pleasures are generous - but a sense of the larger context enriches the overall experience.

There's a suggestion that Roong is a member of the Karen ethnic group, a hill tribe people who live in northern Thailand and eastern Burma and have been involved in human-rights struggles with both countries. Like Min, whose skin rash probably developed after he hid from the police in a septic tank, she enters the forest like a refugee.

When the three characters finally find their way into the forest, a journey punctuated by an unexpectedly funny joke pegged to the film's credits and a plaintive encounter between Orn and a male acquaintance, the mood and the look shift into a different register. There, in a forest as thick with mystery as a painting by Henri Rousseau, Mr. Weerasethakul lets loose beauty with a vengeance.

As the filmmaker freely indulges in the forest's voluptuousness and his own feel for composition, his characters - freed from work, the city and everyday life - shed their clothes and tentatively bump against one another with both pleasure and frustration. In this secret place, where even the smallest gesture becomes an epic of emotion, these three people finally find a moment of quiet by letting the earth swallow them whole.


Village Voice

Love in the Afternoon
by J. Hoberman

Avant-pop marches on - and with his unpronounceable name, unknown intentions, and casually uninflected camera placement, Apichatpong Weerasethakul is well positioned to hold the banner high.

There are other contenders - the German miserablist Fred Kelemen, the Nigerian home-video maker Tunde Kelani, even born-again Gus Van Sant - but the 34-year-old Weerasethakul, Thailand's leading (Thailand's only?) experimental filmmaker, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute with a production company called Kick the Machine, and a two-time prizewinner at Cannes, is the reigning faux primitive on the international festival circuit. His ultra-durational strategy deploys long takes, blunt editing, and awkwardly apparent non-actors, in the service of minimal narrative situations that seem neither staged nor "found." Bad filmmaking or an artfully artless breakthrough into something else?

Scarcely dour, Weerasethakul's movies are suffused with an odd sense of cine-euphoria and promote a particular comic bafflement. Mysterious Object at Noon, the title of his first feature, applies to his entire project. (His movies are no easier to follow or, indeed, find in Thailand.) Mysterious Object, which had its local premiere at the Voice/BAM series in 2001, followed by a run at Anthology (and is available on DVD from Plexifilm), documents a free-floating narrative that has apparently been improvised—by disparate interviewees—in the manner of the surrealist party game wherein artists take turns working blind on a collective drawing. Eventually concerning a disabled child and his (never seen) visitor from outer space, this episodic tale incorporates all manner of local soap operas, video games, and folktales—not to mention the other random distractions that a Thai afternoon might provide.

Weerasethakul has never had a film in the New York Film Festival (or even New Directors), but his second feature, Blissfully Yours - which topped the 2002 Voice critics' poll for best undistributed movie and placed again last year - shows six times this weekend at BAMcinématek as part of the " Village Voice: Best of 2003” series. Interviewed in these pages several years ago, Weerasethakul described Blissfully Yours as a "sweet romance" that would last three hours and unfold in real time. The concept was eventually modified, but at two hours, it remains a profoundly unhurried movie. Many scenes are only a single shot, often in a moving vehicle. Romance, however, is in the air - and on the ground.

The movie is set on Thailand's northwest border. Min is an illegal immigrant from Burma, afflicted with psoriasis; girlish Roong and her older co-worker Orn look after the taciturn refugee. The movie begins with Min getting a medical examination; after 45 minutes or so, it inexplicably shifts gears - providing opening credits and a perky samba - as Min and Roong drive into the jungle, Flintstones knickknacks bobbling merrily on the dashboard. They pick berries and find a scenic spot to picnic. Roong kisses skittish Min, but contact is uncomfortable for him. The couple are fending off ants when Weerasethakul cuts to Orn and a man unglamorously fucking somewhere else in the forest. It's part of the movie's charm that the viewer is also lost in the woods. Finished with her tryst, Orn wanders off downstream to stumble upon Roong blissfully servicing Min. Later, Roong spends long, dreamy minutes playing with Min's penis or just gazing up at the clouds in the sky.

A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy. The enchanted forest is even more pronounced in Weerasethakul's new Tropical Malady, also set in northwest Thailand. The less explicit but equally eccentric love story involves a Thai soldier and a peasant boy, and the mood is even more archaic. The jungle is filled with a variety of spirits, human and animal. Surely the first movie to subtitle a talking monkey and win a prize at Cannes, Tropical Malady is unlikely to make Weerasethakul a household name - but it confirms his status as a giant of fourth-world cinema. Look for it next year at BAM.


Time Out

Apichatpong's 'emotional disaster movie' opens wittily with the longest pre-credits scene ever: a leisurely introduction to the three main characters and the binds that tie them. Min (Oo) is a Burmese illegal immigrant, a strapping lad with a nagging skin problem, in need of a fake ID. His Thai girlfriend Roong (Kanokporn), a factory worker, has hired Orn and her husband to help get it. Orn wants to have another child before she's too old, but her husband isn't keen. The credits show up some 45 minutes in, as Min guides Roong to a secluded spot near the Thai-Burmese border where they'll eat, laze, bathe and eventually make love. By chance Orn has chosen a spot nearby for illicit sex with her lover... There's more here than meets the eye: the shattered Thai economy and the Burmese military junta are only just offscreen, and unvoiced fears simmer in the sweltering heat. But the film takes its tone from the uncomplicated Min, whose diary notes and sketches are sometimes superimposed over the images. A languid celebration of the pleasures of the moment, which climaxes with an image of startling sexual candour. TR


EYE weekly

by Jason Anderson

The last one on this list but the first in my affections. The story of a young Thai woman's afternoon sojourn with her Burmese lover, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's formally audacious, headily sensual and, yes, genuinely blissful movie is my favourite feature of the last two years. It might turn out to be yours, too.