Apichatpong Weerasethakul has mentioned in interviews that he is a rebel and is also very obsessed with contrasts. Religion says not to compare, but to understand yourself. He believes that if you want to understand yourself, then you need to compare. "Tropical Diseases" is a good illustration of his point of view.
"Tropical Diseases" can be divided into two units. The plots of the two units are independent of each other, but they are indispensable in meaning. The audience can restore the emotion that Apichatpong wants to describe in the comparison. The whole picture.
Watching "Tropical Illness" can be a little drowsy, with the languid and domineering peculiarity of tropical countries. There is a strong contrast and intertext between the boy Tong and the soldier Keng. Tong seems to be a wild beast in the jungle, and Keng is the maintainer of human order, but at the same time, their relationship seems comfortable and sweet. The first half of the movie and the second half called "Soul" also have such a pattern of opposites and complements. The connection between Tong and Keng, under the control of the director, completely throws away the rules of human society, and is placed in the hot and humid jungle to reveal the essence - pursuit and taming.
In the first half, Keng is the leader. In the second half, Keng loses his name and is only referred to as a soldier. Tong is the guided one, and in the second half is the tiger spirit deep in the jungle.
On the surface, the first half is easier to watch, with clear character relationships, simple and straightforward dialogues, notes that say I like you, silly words whispered between lovers and love songs in the night. In the second half, there are only a few paragraphs of chanting, the repressed breathing sound and the ubiquitous insect chirping.
If the whole movie is a guessing game, the first half is the mystery of the wise and foolish, on the contrary, the long and silent second half is the answer to the film's calmness.
In the first half, Tong showed a shy smile to the beautiful girl in the car, and at this time Keng patted his shoulder behind him and entered Tong's world. Although Tong didn't even remember his name at the time, his life was completely occupied by Keng after that. Tong's look back also heralds a change in his sexuality.
What happened after that seemed quite natural. Keng guides Tong in this relationship, as if a human is teaching the beast how to survive in human society. Along the way, Tong sometimes looks at his coaches and the vast world of rules behind them with his teenage naivety. He refuses when he is learning to drive - can I be learning in a few days. He also wears Keng's uniform and goes around town, teasing the shoe store owner, pretending to be looking for a job, but when the boss asks if he knows anything about shoes, he replies with a bit of sarcasm, "What do you need to know about shoes?" . Keng talked to him, saying that if the palm prints of the two people were combined together to form the shape of a royal warship, then the two of them would definitely grow old together, but he said that the warship, we are just a bamboo raft. As a guided person, he would laugh at Keng, "You soldiers always die in accidents." Keng was a little melancholy at this time, "I hate to die before I love."
Tong is out of tune with the town, just like the soldier out of tune with the jungle that represents Keng in the second half.
The second half is inspired by No Inthanon's novel. Legend has it that there was a Khmer monk who liked to disguise himself as various animals to play tricks on the villagers. The tiger's body is displayed in the Kanchanaburi Museum in Thailand, and the intertext starts from here. In the first half, Tong mentioned that he had dressed up as a soldier in Kanchanaburi before, and also left a photo. At the beginning of the second half, when the villagers say that the animals keep disappearing, Keng is flipping through photos of Tong, implying that the tiger spirit actually represents Tong.
Under such an intertextual relationship, the somewhat bland and realistic plot in the first half is sublimated extremely violently in the magical mysticism of the second half.
In the second half, the two hunted each other in the jungle, and the monkey explained their relationship, "I see that you are both his prey and his traveling companion." "Kill him and free him from the spirit world; or Killed by him, enter his world." Under the constant intrusion of tiger spirits, the soldier completely collapsed after accidentally killing a cow. He was no longer a human walking upright. He climbed up to the tiger, knelt with a knife in hand, and looked at the tiger in the tree. This is reminiscent of Keng's slightly evil look at the camera at the beginning of the film. It may be looking at the audience, but it may also be facing Tong. At that time, he was calm and superior, which contrasted and echoed with the current gaze.
When looking at each other, the soldier said silently: "Now, I see myself here, I see my mother, my father, my fears and sorrows. Everything is real, so real, and they bring me back to reality. I used to be greedy. Suck your soul, we are no longer humans or animals. It's time to stop breathing." The tiger responded: "Soldier, I miss you."
"I used to suck your soul so greedily." Personally, I think it corresponds to Keng's pursuit and guidance of Tong in the first half. The soldier's soft voice and the tiger's hoarse voice were contrary to the voices of the two men in the first half, and were constantly bewildering us.
After the roar of the tiger, the soldier's chanting sounded again: "Monster (in fact, this is the literal translation of the Thai title), I will give you my spirit, my flesh, and my memory." The camera cuts to the soldier's tearful face: "Every drop of my blood sings our song, a song of joy, can you hear it?"
At this point, we understand that in this same-sex love, there is always a relationship of chasing and taming. Keng tamed Tong, and the tiger spirit tamed the soldiers. We used to be one man and one beast, and when we fell in love, we became monsters, beautiful and sad monsters. This strange word is not the blame of homosexuality itself, but the blame imposed by invisible social rules. Between same-sex love, with the power that is not domesticated by the outside world, it is more primitive and fierce. This is not something that social rules can intervene and teach, it is nature itself, which cannot be changed.
After that, the camera switched to the sky covered by the jungle, and in the midst of the wind and the noise of grass blades, I heard a sound similar to the whizzing of a motorcycle, and the whole film ended. I don't know if it corresponds to Keng's motorcycle sound in the first half, because in the first half there is also a naked Tong in the second half, which can constitute a different echo from other hints that directly breaks the relationship between time and space.
In the second half of the film, there are only three vocal narrations, but they are very domineering, as if it were the brightest steel knife in the fog, piercing the mystery and uncovering the mystery of the film.
Apichatpong once mentioned in an interview that Tropical Diseases is black. He believes that love is a disease that all people have, and that there are symptoms. Love is beautiful, you can't live or die and forget to describe love. Presumably that's why the literal monster is translated as tropical disease. He also mentioned that the inspiration for his films all came from the land of Thailand where he grew up. Thai culture is quite appropriate and all-encompassing. People with different world views can tolerate each other, and do not use their own subjective will to criticize each other and force the other party to follow them. So all kinds of people grow naturally, even if they are weird, but no one finds it weird. This kind of real magic makes Apichatpong's films very exciting. After winning the Palme d'Or in 2004, Apichatpong won the Palme d'Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. 2015's "Gorgeous Tomb" once again touched the theme of the military and the royal family. It has been in preparation for five years and may be his last film work.
Apichatpong's restraint and quietness in front of the camera are very rare among Thais. Whether it is the ruling General Prayuth, politicians, or ordinary people, they always play some humor in front of people, which makes people very happy. But Apichatpong's joy in front of the camera was not the joy of humor, but simply because he was talking about what he liked. He talked about the basic skill of film, which is the editing of time. He doesn't like too much realism in his films, so he breaks the illusion by having the actors suddenly meet the audience's eyes. He believes that all kinds of movies are valuable because they are traces of human existence. Maybe those narrators, with his handwriting, witnessed fear and sadness all the time, and then became themselves.
Let's end this review with the song that Tong sang for Keng, it fits the whole film, "I miss you day and night, I fell in love with you, our hearts are connected, our souls are connected, because of the jungle trail. We Will always be loyal to each other, on the jungle trails."
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