TROPICAL MALADY

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The shot is of a kind to be integrated softly, from the bottom if slightly high, or from the back if detached from a core element. Symmetrically, one does leave the shot, for it would mean underlining or sharpening its bounds. One actually evanesces into it. Having told Keng they wouldn’t meet again, Tong reaches into profundity, absorbed by a night where perspective fades away. In Tropical Malady, one does not break, one fades. Half way through the film, a tale purports to fall as a celestial harrow upon this haven, but when that happens it is according to some minimalist economy of signs, so that it does not generate the expected pandemonium. Joe lets some intertitles take charge of the narrative, and what he keeps for his frame are only summary traces: footprints on the ground, a clawed trunk, flies hovering over a turd. For this is how the terrible beast pins itself on the frame. Softly, softly. To add a tale, what does it mean exactly? A monkey and a tiger, the self-same animals that in the first part could have appeared in matching eyeline in some amorous wandering. Except that to the shrill cries of one are added some subtitles, and to the still moustache of the other is added a voice-over. Between the real and the legend of the real there is but the hushed adding of two or three signs.
François Bégaudeau, Cahiers du cinéma, November 2004