Now it was making its first American stop. Entering the gallery, I meandered through an eerie, darkened space with something approaching fear. Images of boys and landscapes and fire jumped out at me, like figures in a haunted house.
America was my home, and he was a guest here. Although Weerasethakul was happy to be back in Chicagoβhe earned an M. You have the sound of the air-conditioner and the heater. The sound is so beautiful in its proper space.
Like that other poet-filmmaker before him Jean Cocteau , Weerasethakul, who goes by the nickname Joe, produces a cinema in which dreams and politics converge.
Posing and laughing: even in the presence of death, Weerasethakul seems to be saying, we pretend for the camera, for our friends, the better to feel includedβbut in what? The brutality of living? The action shifts to Keng Banlop Lomnoi , a soldier in a rural community in northeastern Thailand. Keng meets Tong Sakda Kaewbuadee , a sweet, younger man, a civilian, and the two begin a relationship against a backdrop of big Thai sky and dark, breathing jungle.
Weerasethakul develops a new choreography for the dance of love, the malady of love. There are no sweeping violins or roiling surf. About an hour into this splendor, the screen goes dark. For a beat. Then another beat. Then another. Now we see another soldier Huai Dessom. On the hunt, the soldier grows weary; perhaps Weerasethakul needs him to be tired in order to make him more susceptible to what he sees: a naked man in a clearing who behaves like a tiger, rubbing his body against a tree.
