Theme Park Planet
THE WORLD
TROPICAL MALADY
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The World is an ensemble drama on themes of globalization, set in a Beijing theme park where workers live, work, love and die against a backdrop of scaled-down replicas of the world's great monuments. Tropical Malady starts out as a chaste gay love story, then reinvents itself midway through as a lovely, inscrutable dream based on a Thai legend; the second half metaphorically represents and poetically interprets the first.
Yet these outwardly dissimilar movies share one crucial quality: They attain complexity by embracing simplicity. They depict common rituals, simple emotions and primal situations with such oblique precision that we're encouraged to draw our own connections between the movie and the world beyond its frame line. Every moment feels at once real and unreal, specific and universal, immediate and primordial. The films suggest rather than declare, and encourage interpretation and personal response-qualities shared by all art worth talking about.
Jia Zhangke's The World arrives in the U.S. preceded by near-unanimous critical praise. The more awestruck notices tend to gloss over the movie's flaws; there are narrative gaps that seem more like evidence of disorganization and overreaching than conscious, elliptical intent, and Jia sometimes seems determined to freight even minor scenes with "importance" by letting them run as long as possible. (Movies you like are never slow; they're "deliberate.") But The World is still a rich, revelatory feature, equally informed by Robert Altman's panoramic ensemble dramas (think A Wedding and Short Cuts) and Frederick Wiseman's real-time-obsessed documentaries about anonymous people interacting with huge, faceless institutions.
Jia's ironically titled movie suggests the world has shrunk thanks to technology (characters deliver both mundane and powerfully upsetting information via text message), and that cultural differences are becoming more a matter of habit and ritual than substance. (Visitors pose before replicas of the Sphinx, the Pyramids, Red Square, the Taj Mahal, the Arc de Triomphe and a still-intact World Trade Center, and the park's predominantly Chinese cast of performers doubles for citizens of almost every other nation represented in the park.) Rather than bring people closer, these developments have encouraged people to live in private bubbles and become more alienated from themselves and each other (and more ripe for exploitation by unseen masters). Several relationships in The World seem to double, or at least echo, each other. Yet the participants never realize this because they're too busy working, politicking, sleeping or dealing with the two or three personal matters they have time to contemplate.
Jia's technological/sociological theses aren't new-scholars have been arguing and writing about them for about 40 years, and citizens have been living them. (Wim Wenders' globetrotting 1976 thriller The American Friend might have been the first art-house picture to address them explicitly; as the movie unreels, its various international backdrops blur into one big airport terminal.) But Jia's is less interested in explicating words like "globalization," "homogenization" and "simulacrum" (properly a job for academics, not artists) than in finding a visual correlative for them, and exploring their impact on individuals in a nonjudgmental way. He doesn't tell us what to think; he invites us to think for ourselves.Ê
The movie's aloof, at times chilly tone (practically Kubrickian) sees the characters as the park itself might see them (with zoological interest) and holds Jia's tapestry together when it threatens to unravel. After a Brooklyn Academy of Music screening last month, I heard some viewers complaining that The World was long, slow, repetitious and cold-all accurate descriptions. Yet these weaknesses are paradoxical sources of strength, because they let the viewer feel a bit of what the characters must feel as they live and work in the park (and in surrounding Beijing, which is also portrayed as synthetic, oppressive, bland and indifferent to human yearning).Ê
Whole scenes, images and moments repeat themselves, often at length: a fashion show starring professional yet bored-looking dancers; a nearly identical, super-low-angled tracking shot of characters navigating the sterile, echoing halls under the stage; dancer Tao (Zhao Tao) riding the monorail that encircles the park while a recorded announcement promises that one can "See the world without ever leaving Beijing!" literally go around The World in 15 minutes. Different but similarly framed conversations occur on the "Eiffel Tower" observation deck, its height disclosing The World in all its jumbled smallness. Different groups of tourists pretend to support a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa while a friend crouches down on the pavement, shooting upward with a camera to make them look like giants. (This one gag might be the movie's best example of how institutions can engineer and control "spontaneous" reactions.) The movie's most poignant images are of Tao and her boyfriend Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) lying on a cot in Taisheng's stark, barely furnished flat, fumbling toward sex and discussing ambitions they'll probably never realize, together or alone, because they're just too poor and exhausted. This World is not the world, but a dispiriting simulation, tended by wage slaves who take pleasure in text messages, pop songs and personal intrigue because they've been robbed of the time, energy and imaginative space to dream big and act on those dreams. The park's simulated monuments are manufactured replacements for dreams. That's not just a summary of Jia's global vision, but an implicit critique of most movies.Ê
But not Tropical Malady, a mysterious drama from Thailand that might be the only film on New York screens right now that's more deliberate, coded and demanding than The World. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's love story is more temperamentally attuned to Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger's experimental films (and Antonioni's L'Eclisse and The Passenger) than most commercial cinema being made today, in any nation. It's really two (possibly two-and-one-tenth) movies that selectively mirror each other.
The first part depicts the tentative courtship between country boy Tong (Sakda Kawebuadee) and his companion and sometime suitor, a handsome gentleman soldier named Keng (Banlop Lomnoi). They're both closeted (Tong more than Keng), cut off from their true natures and continually bombarded with casual assumptions that they're thinking about, or involved with, women. They express their love for each other in private; only in the woods near a temple or in a darkened movie theater can the men casually touch each other without fear of censure or attack. Their relationship, chronicled in a series of rough, real-time scenes with ambient sound, is achingly real (a key, sentimental moment pivots on a Clash tape). The first half climaxes with a mysterious exchange on a roadside at night that ends in a loving, animalistic gesture (mouths on hands) followed by Tong's wordless retreat into the darkness of the rain forest.
At this point-the midway mark-Weerasethakul elevates his central relationship beyond anecdote by rethinking it as a fable of a hunter and his shape-shifting quarry. The men's chameleonic approach to self-preservation in a straight world is worked out poetically, through quiet, dark, meticulously composed storybook images. The hunter knows who he is and what he must do, but the object of his quest keeps changing form (evidenced by human fooprints becoming pawprints), vocalizing its hunger from a distance and retreating/disappearing when the hunter gets close. The film's final confrontation-man facing animal, separated by great distance and height and enfolded by jungle gloom-is one of the eeriest visualizations of an unbridgable love in modern cinema.