Review: Tropical Malady

Both love story and folk tale, Tropical Malady intersects eros with cultural traditions.

Tropical Malady
Photo: Strand Releasing

There’s a scene in David O. Russell’s intermittingly brilliant I Heart Huckabees where Dustin Hoffman’s “existential detective” likens a bed sheet to the tissue that connects the world around us. In Tropical Malady, writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul more successfully evokes an existential fiber between sexual desire and cultural mythos in the pastoral jungle outside of a Thai village when a young soldier, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), falls in love with a country boy, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee).

Weerasethakul’s metaphysical fascination with ordinary human gestures and the shape of everyday objects colors Keng and Tong’s bittersweet courtship. Keng gives Tong a tape of music by the Clash but forgets to give him his heart, and when Keng attempts to transplant his love for Tong via a simple gesticulation of his arm, the transfusion of Keng’s cosmic-romantic energy is ravishingly felt in the director’s enchanted compositions. But if Tropical Malady begins as a simple love story, it turns into something more profound when Keng enters the jungle in pursuit of a creature allegedly responsible for killing Tong’s mother’s livestock.

Because Weerasethakul equates Keng and Tong’s suffocating love for one another to a twisted landscape of trees, Tropical Malady could just as easily have been called Unbearably Yours. A glorious mood piece, the film mirrors the yin of Keng’s pursuit of Tong throughout the first half of the film to the yang of Keng’s spiritual journey through the second half. Though the film’s two parts seem as if they could work independently of one another, the first half clearly anticipates the second, or, more precisely, the second half seems to reimagine the more conventional first part as a primitive tribal dance. Both parts seem to tell the same story—only one says it with considerably less words.

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Keng’s love for Tong borders on unrequited: When Keng smells Tong’s hand after Tong urinates on the side of the road, he returns the erotic sentiment by aggressively licking Keng’s hand. Earlier, Keng grabs Tong’s leg during an incredibly erotic scene in a movie theater, to which an excited Tong responds by trapping Keng’s hand between his thighs and grabbing his shoulders with his arm. The twisting arms and legs anticipate the tangle of trees that similarly bind them during the film’s second half. Both love story and folk tale, Tropical Malady intersects eros with cultural traditions, heralding the thrill of the chase and asserting that the deepest romances are not sexual but spiritual in nature. Literally.

Score: 
 Cast: Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee  Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul  Screenwriter: Apichatpong Weerasethakul  Distributor: Strand Releasing  Running Time: 117 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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