Apichatpong Weerasethakul | สุดเสน่หา (Sud sanaeha) (Blissfully Yours) / 2002

shedding skin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (screenwriter and director) สุดเสน่หา (Sud sanaeha) (Blissfully Yours) / 2002

 

Apichatpong's film, Blissfully Yours, won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, prognostic of his being awarded the 2010 Palme d'Or for his most recent film. Many critics have understandably praised the 2002 picture as a beautifully, slow-paced, idyll.

    Perhaps they saw another film, however, than the one I watched again the other afternoon on my DVD. Yes, it is a beautiful film, and it is certainly slow-paced with regard to what most people think of as "story"—the credits do not appear until 45 minutes into the film. But, as Weerasethakul made apparent in Tropical Malady, this director not tell his story through action or language, but through image and gesture, gestures often so small that they do not even seem significant.

     Indeed, throughout the first long scene the main character, Min (Min Oo) does not even speak, as three women, a doctor, his girlfriend Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram), and her friend/landlady Orn (Jenjira Jansuda), prod and stroke him as if he were a prize stud bull up for sale. By accident, I saw that first scene without subtitles; finally realizing that the previous viewer had obviously watched the movie in Thai, I quickly made the correction and started again. But I hardly needed the subtitles to realize that these women’s actions in lavishing so much attention to the body of this handsome young male were strange and vaguely perverse.

     Roong and Orn describe the man as a cousin from the country, but in fact—so we discover at the end of the film—he is a fugitive on the run from Burma, illegally in Thailand. Accordingly, the two women have not allowed him to speak for fear his newly-learned Thai and his accent will betray the truth. He has had a terrible problem with his throat for years, and is mute, they insist, even as the doctor discovers no evidence of infection.

     What we learn from the entire first scene is that both Roong and Orn survive in this Northeastern corner of the country through a series of seductions and lies, small acts of thievery and petty betrayals. Orn tries to convince the doctor to give Min a medical certificate (necessary if he is to find a job), promising that Roong will bring in his passport within the week. The doctor refuses, and Orn, trying to use her long acquaintance with the doctor as a tool, attempts again and again to convince the doctor to change her mind, even as the nurse calls for her next patient. Min, evidently, suffers from psoriasis (he is shedding like a snake declares Roong), but the two women have replaced the doctor's prescribed lotion with cheap hand-softeners from the grocers. Similarly, Orn has replaced her prescription of sleeping pills with an over-the-counter mood control drug. Are they selling the real drugs? One can only wonder when, in the very next scene, Orn and Min visit Orn's husband at his office, where she mixes up a new batch of cheap lotion with vegetables that make the salve appear more like an avocado salad that a cure for his rash. While Orn mixes her new concoction, Min waits, where one of the male office executives attempts to flirt with him, encouraging Min to steal away with him for a sexual encounter. Min seems almost oblivious, and one wonders for a moment, if he might not take him up on his offer in the same way that Tong casually accepts Keng's advances in Tropical Malady.

     The long drive from Orn's husband's office to the porcelain factory, where Roong paints mass-made figurines, may seem to the unobservant viewer as simply a picturesque trip through the countryside; but what we witness out of the back of Orn's Toyota Corolla is something close to what one might see in the poorest sections of the American South. The small shanty-like houses and stores around which rush citizens on motorbikes is a far cry from Bangkok or even the factory that seems almost hidden away from the badly-paved roads. This is a territory of poverty, and to survive in this world, it is clear its citizens must rely on their cleverness and stealth. Min (who evidently briefly worked at the factory) has been told that he is banned from the grounds, but the gatekeepers seem happy to see him, as does the dog they keep. Roong, meanwhile, convinces her manager, after a series of questions, that she is ill, managing her escape. Exchanging her motorcycle with Orn's car, the two lovers, Roong and Min, are suddenly off for picnic in the country. Only now do credits appear, a Thai version of a Brazilian samba accompanying them.

     It is also true that for much of the rest of the film, Apichatpong—taking us along in the journey away from this deprived society into the lush and tropical wonders of the jungle, where Roong and Min picnic, shyly make love, and soak up the sun—formulates his film in the context of a sexual idyll. But just as we may have missed a great deal of detail in the first part of the work, to characterize the rest of the film in that simple manner is to miss everything. This garden is, after all, not just any garden, but a special one for Min; he has clearly been here before. Here also lie fruit trees from which he begins to eat (in a clear reversal of the Adam and Eve story, which it recalls), before passing its berries on to Roong. But then, perhaps he is not, symbolically speaking, Adam, but is the serpent of the creation myth to which Roong has already compared him; his flaking skin is the major issue in the movie.

    As a man between borders, trapped in a country where he literally has not yet found a new identity, Min must also shed the old to become a new being, which works nicely with the creation myth at which Apichatpong has hinted.

     But, where, one can only wonder, is Adam?

     I am not suggesting through these perceived parallels Apichatpong is a symbolist, setting up a series of analogs by which the moviegoer can comprehend his film. But his work is clearly influenced by traditional Thai and international mythology, that embrace a multitude of possibilities and even contradictions. And we cannot help but wonder that if the woman and the snake have now embraced, how that myth might end.

      By chance—although, despite the seeming casualness and spontaneity of this director, I believe he leaves very little to pure "chance"—Orn has made her own journey to the country with the very man who had propositioned Min. This spot of jungle, it appears, is a sort of "lover's retreat." While Orn and her lover are portrayed having heterosexual, if slightly brutal, sex—no romantic lover's games for them—their motorcycle is stolen. Even more ominous is the fact that when Orn's friend, pulling up his pants, attempts to run after the thieves, we hear, soon after, the sound of a gunshot. So much for idylls!

   Presumably killed, he does not appear in the movie again, as Orn wanders forward in the undergrowth, ultimately showing up—her clothes torn, her skin scratched—at the very spot where Roong is now engaging in oral sex. Throughout their romantic interlude, Min, his whole body affected by his shedding skin, is almost entirely passive. Only after Roong completes the act, does Orn move towards them.

     Although Roong has spoken out against Orn previously (she'd be better without her, she declares to Min) we know that Min thinks of her (on the basis of his drawings of the two, overlain upon the screen during much of this country "escape") almost as Roong's sexual equal. And it is apparent, that both women desire him. The women "face off" in the nearby stream, Roong tossing water into Orn's face, Orn returning the offense. At first rather fiercely, but gradually shifting to smiles and mysterious purposefulness, they push, pull, and pinch one another, until both are waterlogged, many of their gestures suggesting a sort of baptism of one another and their beloved Min, before they swim in and out of one another's space, undressing, finally, upon the riverbank.

     As they lie down to rest, Roong gently plays with Min's penis as he sleeps, never in this film to again awaken. Orn, nearby and just out-of-sight, writhes in obvious emotional distress, clearly out of loss (her son we are told has been drowned), loneliness and, perhaps, jealousy. Any joy these locals may have experienced has been so brief that it now hardly matters.

     The voiceover says everything: Min goes off to a job in Bangkok, leaving the two cast forever out of any possible paradise they might have inhabited. Roong gets "another boyfriend" and sells noodles. "Orn continues to work as an extra in Thai movies," so the voice humorously reports, as if that has been her role—just as in this film—all along. Life in this outpost goes drearily on. 

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2002; revised September 16, 2010

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2010).