Tropical malady

I got round to seeing the gay Thai Cannes-award-winner, Tropical Malady. Did it waste my time? I'm not sure. Anyone who has patient Thai-speaking friends could ask them to listen to the director's soundtrack commentary on the Thai dvd version and find clues as to what you should be seeing/thinking.

I could only watch the subtitled 10-minute to-camera comments Apichatpong Weerasethakul grudgingly made for the international dvd. I gained few insights. The bespectacled auteur appeared to think that "Film" needed to find new ways to express truths or it would become redundant. And that centrifugal "Thailand" was wiping out minority cultures. And that his films blend his and his actors' "memories". I wondered how he persuaded a clutch of European producers (Swiss-French names, mainly) to back him and provide various other European-named production and technical advisers. And why they let his final edit keep so many non-dramatic blackouts and long long-shots.

Other scenes were illogical, puzzling, maybe deliberate mysteries. At the film's beginning, a Thai border patrol team find an unidentified male corpse, naked and later not naked. There is a pseudo-climactic end to the movie's first half (a tale of a soldier's thwarted day-lit homosexual love somewhere in the mountainous north), when the viewer cannot be sure what a couple of quickly masked snapshots reveal. Throughout much of the wholly different second half (a ghost story with a tiger and a tattooed man trailing the soldier figure in jungle at night), the collage of shots is frustratingly non-linear/logical.

The movie begins as a tantalising, sensitive and semi-credible Thai-language counterpart of Brokeback Mountain. Much of that's worth watching. But it is hard to sense why the handsome soldier is gay and why he'd fallen in love with a somewhat gormless peasant lad who likes to be looked at by girls. A Thai Heath Ledger, he definitely is not

The director says he found one of his two lead actors (the somewhat gormless one, I guess) by handing out fliers in Silom to disco-goers, and the other one used to be a video cameraman he knew. He made them share a bedroom so they'd develop appropriate feelings in their acting. That may well explain the thwarted plotlines.