This is an ongoing series of movie reviews by Dano Nissen. Since coming to Thailand, he has been reviewing movies (nang) [หนัง] on a one to five “chang” [ช], scale (ช-ชชชชช). The coveted “golden chang” is reserved for the best of the best. *May contain minor movie spoilers*
Dano Nissen, 134 TESS
Welcome to another installment of Dano Changs the Nangs! Let me introduce you to three essential works from Thailand’s most celebrated director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The Isaan-born director is known for slow-burn magical realist stories that often take place in rural parts of his home region. I’m sure we Peace Corps volunteers will quickly recognize the trappings of placid rural life seen in most of his films. As always, I rate the films on a ช-ชชชชช scale, with the occasional and elusive golden ชชชชช.
Tropical Malady 2004 ชชช
Weerasethakul’s bifurcated sophomore narrative feature contains two tales. First, a queer love story of two soldiers and then a fable of a mysterious being haunting a forest. The first half coolly displays the quotidian going ons of life, as volunteers kicking around site long enough know all too well. It’s slow. Tender. And meandering. Kinda like our lives since swearing-in. Boom! We are plunged into an entirely different place with new faces and a fantastical side to the world we just left. It’s a fever dream concocted from all those ghost stories you’ve heard your students forewarn.
The shift is jarring, so much so it reportedly drove festival-goers out of the theater during the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. Despite alienating many critics at the festival, the film won the Jury Prize – quite an achievement considering this is the first-ever Thai film to be entered in the competition.
It’s a tough watch, no doubt – with its confounding narrative structure (or lack thereof) and its plodding journey into Thai mysticism with all the illogic of a dream. But, the film helped launch an exciting young filmmaker, showing us all the early hallmarks of his oeuvre, which captures life out here in strangely beautiful ways.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives (2010) ชชชช
Many of us have experienced death in our communities in ways unfamiliar to us back home. I’ve gone to strangers’ funerals on day-of notice; I’ve been kept awake by all night weeklong parties for the recently deceased; and I’ve sat talking and playing games with the neighborhood kids as they mourn and celebrate a family member at a wake. Death is an intimate affair here. Everyone shows up and huddles together in support of a life belonging to someone we may not even know. I’ve found people’s attitudes towards death to be quite optimistic compared to in the West.
Uncle Boonmee is all about death in Thailand, Isaan specifically. Weerasethakul sits us down in close quarters with a family and their terminally ill uncle. We see, close-up, a family come to terms with the inevitable end, reckon with ghosts from the past and traverse the many lives lived and the ones to come in the cycle of reincarnation.
Six years after Weerasethakul’s Cannes debut, he won the top prize of Palm D’or for “Uncle Boonmee,” the first Thai film to do so. It packs the same jarring watermarks that made his first Cannes submission so divisive – the supernatural lurking quietly in a Northeastern Thai forest, minimal dialogue drowned out by crickets and so on. But this is the more fully realized film, richer in its exploration of Thai mysticism and overall more satisfying and memorable. The ghosts and other disturbances inhabiting the forest leave their mark, both haunting us and comforting us long after the credits roll.
Memoria (2021) ชชชชช
Weerasethakul spirits us away to the other side of the globe for his first English language film, set in Bogota, Colombia and the country’s jungle outskirts. The foreign territory notwithstanding, he touches on not-so-foreign themes in his filmography. Again, he juxtaposes hectic city life with the fantastical aura of the jungle, where, as always, something lurks.
We follow a Scottish expat, played by Tilda Swinton, as she, and she alone, experiences unsettling loud noises ringing from the ether. It’s a meditative, existential mystery at a walking pace like its predecessor, but with more verve than anything he’s done before.
Swinton commands Weerasethakul’s naturalistic tone so well you forget she’s a household name, a first in the employ of the indie director. She steals the show, which is all hers – a trudging one-woman odyssey.
Where the film excels is its delivery on its premise, which, to put it roughly, is: what’s that weird noise? The answer is a sonic delight, filled with an inventive sound design that curates even the most banal of noises into a cacophony of terror and intrigue.
Sticky Rice 
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