Apichatpong Weesethakul’s Tropical Malady, about the budding love affair between a Thai soldier and a country bumpkin, doesn’t exactly confound interpretation, as befuddled critics and audiences - including Quentin Tarantino, who spearheaded the Cannes jury that handed it the “Un Certain Regard” award that year - seemed to assert. The audiences at Cannes would be familiar with this sort of magic realism as it were—if not in their own national cinema, then at least through viewings of Hongkong martial-arts/fantasy films, or Japanese ghost stories that have been the staple of recent popular Asian cinema.

What I thought was most jarring is this magic-realist combination with his fiddling around with narrative: the oneiric presentation of events in the first half, and the sudden split in the center. (I liked the plunge into darkness in the middle, as it was reminiscent of my early movie-viewing days at the Agrix Cinema in Los Banos, when the projectionist would take his sweet time switching the reels.) The romance of the first half gives way to… well, the same romance, though pitched on a dream-like mythological level, or retold on an allegorical plane. (Though as I type this, the words “though pitched on a dream-like mythological level, or retold on an allegorical plane” may in fact be erroneous, as the second half may be seen simply as a literal continuation of the earlier narrative.) There’s something genuinely risky with what Weesethakul accomplishes here, especially since the plot itself is almost nonexistent, but the viewer’s patience will be richly rewarded.

I rented _Tropical Malady” knowing very little about it and it is a remarkable film in how it follows distinct and different rhythms. With a simple plot the film slowly unfolds as a simple love story, but then shifts into a version of a folk tale. As things progress it becomes gradually stranger and more dreamlike. It’s a haunting film from Thailand that is difficult to describe as it feels more like music or poetry than a narrative film.