Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

Nailing down an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film is as hard (and futile) as assigning "answers" to a Terrence Malick film. Like Malick, Weerasethakul builds on ideas from previous films, but Joe goes even further: he reuses not only themes and motifs but actors and even characters. Yet for all his variations on similar, even identical, material, Joe has never made two films exactly alike. Tropical Malady may be the clearest illustration of this, as it comprises two wildly different halves that, when viewed correctly, reveal themselves to be flip-sides of the same subject, approached with such a marked contrast that the two sections seem to share nothing but the same actors.

Coming to Tropical Malady after seeing the films that followed it, I can instantly see what Joe took with him to Syndromes and a Century and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The foundational idea of the latter comes from this film, in a tossed-off line by the illiterate country boy who would return to ease his uncle's passing years later, and the opening scene of soldiers lining up for a photo prefigures the La jetée-inspired still photograph sequence in Joe's latest triumph. Its ties to Syndromes run much deeper: Syndromes split its narrative between rural and urban, capturing the prosaic and poetic in each. Tropical Malady, on the other hand, moves between city and country (in one half, at least) but clearly demarcates a realistic first half from a magical, allegorical and abstract counterpart. This suggests two things: that Weerasethakul had not yet perfected his technique of blending the stark with the searching, and also that he marked such distinct divisions between the two to illustrate the potential and limitations of both.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011)

The grass almost literally looks greener in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies: of all the modern poets of the cinema, "Joe" is by far the most tactile. Though his glacially paced films may create a distance that makes even Terrence Malick or Abbas Kiarostami seem visceral, Weerasethakul is the best at crafting worlds one can nearly reach out and touch. Unlike the masterful contemporary filmmakers whose company Joe enjoys, the Thai director does not intellectualize his reveries. Shots follow characters speaking until suddenly the focus shifts onto another group, an animal or even plant life. It's as if Weerasethakul sets up his shots based on what's the most interesting element in the frame, even if that means moving away from a previous setup altogether. This gives his films a universality he shares with other seemingly esoteric and geocentric filmmakers like Kiarostami or Jia Zhangke, and his ability to mine more abstract metaphysical subjects than the others occasionally makes him stand out even against his hero Abbas.

As I still need to see a few of his films, and because I value the films I have seen so highly, I cannot say whether Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is truly Joe's finest film to date. It is, however, his most ambitious, taking the cross-dimensional split narrative of his erstwhile magnum opus, Syndromes and a Century, to further extremes. That film bifurcated its romance between pairs of country and urban doctors, but Uncle Boonmee moves across the threshold from life to death and back again.