The Invention of Metaphysical Bildungsroman of Tropical Malady
It’s been days ever since I’ve watched Apichatpong’s Tropical Malady, and with its blurry memories that bolstered inside me was the same intensity I’ve felt when I first saw it. I’ll try capturing it as this might be a review, Apichatpong had me hard to encapsulate it, just like it’s better for you to visit a museum and have its empirical beauty rather than read someone’s secondhand version of it.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul gave us different kind love bite with the negation of the conventional narrative and more to its animalistic portrayal — or rather, it is even beyond this rabid personification; something more philosophical and private. He explained love as an emotion that belongs to two people who abandoned their humane ideology, which turned animalistic, and even gone beyond that — something god-like and paradoxically, below that. Where it isn’t that much different to Plato’s symposium, but has its own identity that only Apichatpong can create.
The film was cut into two, diverse stories created in the same setting: secluded, anonymity, and unknown. Where everything is possible to grow anything — a metamorphosis of emotions, simply putting it.
First part produced its own branch of bildungsroman genre, a symbiosis of all the things you’ve known, never thought you’ve known, and you thought you’ve known but suddenly became an unfamiliar entity. Weerasethakul never once in the whole film spoon-fed the audience; it started with ambiguous beginning without any sense of “beginning” and ended with the same style. Yet, with all his experimental touches with its natural narrative on this film, he never did too much. The protagonist, Tong, was consistently seen in all of the given scenes as innocent — his tooth-filled smiles, his simple love for his dog, being uneducated which led us to the way he “read” Keng’s confession, and his way of showing his desire for the other. While the soldier, Keng, gives us an immediate attachment to the identity of Tong, like an enticed firefly towards a brightly lit flame. We can see their connection little by little getting connected without using a conventional sequence — by using the La Nouvelle Vague type of cutting scenes — deliberate and unprecedented. Yet with these kind of effects put together, it still makes sense, and to be honest, gives it a more naturalistic comprehension than a stereotypical bildungsroman film.
The second one is more in terms of complication. Based on a tell-tale, here he focused more on the ideology of “beyond” animalistic, something that’s foreign to me. Out of all the films I’ve watched that tackle about love, they incline to focus on how you can change once you fell in love sans the identity of the opposite end, where you can even turn into a beastly alter ego, using sex as the usual topic to perform it, but again, Apichatpong came to differ. He used it literally, a beast that turned into human because of his attraction. Capturing all the human’s gestures, likes and dislikes — his whole identity and world encompasses with the beast, to see the rabid change. While the human has the opposite effect: he’s becoming animalistic by terms of literal depiction. And with the use of the peculiarity of the story, love depicted as a tug of war — either you kill him or he’ll kill you. With their intention to kill, they audience realize it was indeed love, turning it beyond their own terms of “animalistic transformation”. At the end, they fell in love.
It’s a beautiful film as it never occurred to me, the audience, the complicit fabrication I normally feel even in the most natural cinema. It stayed the same, all throughout. Making you desire for the same intensity they’re portraying in the film as they’re never been seen as the protagonists, but rather, it is what they’re feeling the center of the cinema. I’ve stopped believing in auteur, but with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I’m ready to make an exemption.
