Apichatpong Weerasethakul
8 titles · global slow cinema
Tropical Malady spends an hour on the mild attraction between two men in the sunlit countryside, then stops and restarts as something frightened and lost in the jungle at night. Weerasethakul breaks films in half like that fairly often, and the second part never explains the first. In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a dying man is nursed by the ghost of his wife while his missing son comes home in a non-human shape, and neither arrival is treated as an event. The takes are long and the insects are loud. You sit in the room without being told what to make of it.
Signature
- A structure that breaks in half and abandons its first mode.
- Long static takes in jungle and clinic, ambient sound doing the work of a score.
- Ghosts and past lives presented as ordinary, with no genre framing.
- Non-professional performers, regional dialect, unhurried tempo.
fit
