Blissfully Yours

For his second feature, Blissfully
Yours, Apichatpong Weerasethakul crafted a delicate,
impressionistic depiction of a lazy summer afternoon shared between Min
(Min Oo), a Burmese who has illegally crossed the border into Thailand
looking for work, his girlfriend Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram), and Orn
(Jenjira Jansuda), an older woman who Roong has hired to help Min. The
film is decompressed to an extreme degree: virtually nothing actually
happens in its two hour duration, as routine tasks and long moments of
stasis are captured and mined for their emotional and sensual nuances.
In the lengthy opening scene, which starts the film without any credits
or lead-in, Roong and Orn have taken Min to a doctor to treat his skin
condition, and they simply argue in a low-key way with the doctor about
what's wrong with him and what he needs. Min stays silent; much later,
it will become apparent that Min is pretending to be mute so he won't
reveal his foreign dialect, while Orn is trying to trick the doctor into
giving Min the health certificate he needs to find work. But
Weerashethakul doesn't dwell on any of this. He simply allows the
conversation to play out, as puzzling and elliptical as it is, capturing
the absurd way in which Orn and Roong are forced to keep talking in
circles, confronted by the doctor's obstinate refusal to do anything
outside of regulations.

It is a frustrating, mysterious scene,
but also a strangely funny one; Weerashethakul has a streak of dark but
playful humor that often shows up in moments like this. Here, it becomes
apparent when the conversation with the doctor goes on for several
minutes as though it's about a new condition, and then when the doctor
asks how long this has been going on, they answer that he's had it since
he was a child. It's the kind of absurd reversal of expectations that
Weerashethakul subtly integrates into his otherwise hyper-realistic,
observational aesthetic. Even better is the brief few moments when the
director lingers to watch the doctor's next patient, a hard-of-hearing
old man who's grumpily bickering with his daughter. Upset over his
broken hearing aid, he advises the doctor that if she should have
children, she should have a son because "boys are much better with
electronics than girls."

In this way, Blissfully Yours
simply drifts along, from moment to moment and place to place, patiently
watching these people's daily routines. In one scene, Orn mixes
together chopped-up fruits with a table full of creams and skin lotions,
creating her own concoction, halfway between a fruit salad and a skin
treatment. Weerashethakul loves to watch procedures like this, just as
later his camera admires the careful, methodical way in which Roong
prepares a snack for Min, wrapping up a piece of meat with a cluster of
rice grains, then tearing off a piece of bread to engulf it all, and
dipping the small bunched ball into the juices from some fruit. She
repeats the procedure twice, making one for Min and then one for
herself, and Weerashethakul captures the hypnotic quality of her careful
motions as she assembles these snacks. She does it, perhaps, with the
same mechanical care with which she paints Disney figurines at the
factory where she works, where she's so overworked that, as Min laments
in voiceover, her hands are sore after a particularly hard day. The
film's extreme patience becomes especially clear when, nearly 45 minutes
into the film, the credits suddenly appear as Min and Roong are driving
towards a picnic in a remote woodsy area. It's as though Weerashethakul
is saying, now the movie is starting, everything that came
before was simply a long prelude, an introduction, presenting the
necessary context for what's to come.


Indeed, the earlier scenes have a
groundedness, a quotidian quality, that wafts away once the characters
leave behind the city for their rural getaway. The early scenes
establish that these characters are trying to escape, that they're
bored, fenced in by routine. One of Min's periodic voiceovers even
explicitly calls their picnic in the woods an "escape," and at this
point Weerashethakul's sensuality, his pictorial sensibility, takes
over. As the young couple winds through the woods together, the branches
brush up against their skin and the sun sporadically breaks through the
dense foliage above to flare white-hot in their eyes. They finally
arrive at a beautiful rock cliff above a lush, deep green valley, and
they picnic there, picking berries together in the woods, kissing,
sleeping in the sun, eating, fending off the alarmingly large ants that
scramble across their blanket. The ants are harbingers of the ruin to
come, tangible suggestions that this afternoon is ephemeral, that
whatever happiness they might find here is fragile and easily upturned,
but initially they're just a nuisance to be laughed off.

These
scenes are all about the play of light dappled on bare skin, the casual
sensuality, and sexuality, of the characters as they drift together and
apart over the course of the afternoon, sometimes joined in intimacy and
at other times separated by silence and disconnection. Weerashethakul
intercuts the scenes between the two young lovers with scenes of Orn and
her husband, engaged in a similar indulgent afternoon in the woods not
far from the younger couple. Weerashethakul is all about suggesting
emotional and thematic depths without directly confronting them. Through
subtle gestures, the sex scene between Orn and her husband becomes,
without a word being spoken, about her desire to have a child and his
reluctance to go along with her. The way she watches as he takes off his
condom and throws it away after sex, the way she caresses her own belly
as she lies next to him: these simple gestures say everything about
these characters, their urges and needs. Later, Orn joins up with Roong
and Min, following a strange and elliptical series of events in which
her husband runs off, chasing a motorcycle thief, possibly to die or
merely to confront some more mundane fate, but either way disappearing
from the film without ceremony. Afterward, Orn wanders through the
forest, donning an antiseptic mask she finds on the forest floor. Even
in such a direct and seemingly realistic film, Weerashethakul displays a
weird kind of beneath-the-surface surrealism in small, unexplained
details like this. These seeming non-sequiturs simply add to the film's
richness, its texture, its ineffable sense of mystery.

This
mystery is intact, certainly, throughout the final stretches, in which
hardly a word is spoken. Roong and Min lie down next to a river
together, and nearby Orn lies down by herself in her underwear, her full
middle-aged body looking Rubenesque, straining against the
constrictions of her garments. Roong, in contrast, is childlike and
skinny, and the older woman gently mocks her for it, even as Roong
playfully pinches the older woman's large butt. Weerashethakul pulls
back for a long shot, showing the couple and the woman lying on opposite
sides of the frame, implicitly establishing a comparison between
generations, between maturity and youth. In fact, though, both women
seem equally troubled, linked by their concern for the helpless,
drifting Roong, who they together are helping to shepherd through life
as though he was a child. In the final minutes of the film,
Weerashethakul maintains a steady gaze on Roong's face as she lies next
to Min, lost in thought, absentmindedly stroking his penis. Then he cuts
away for a couplet of moody sunset landscape shots, before returning to
find Roong turning slightly towards the camera, an unreadable
expression on her face for the few frames before the cut to black.

It
is a fittingly mysterious ending, and that's even before the strange
textual coda that scrolls across the screen a few seconds later,
describing Min going to Bangkok for a job, Roong getting another
boyfriend and selling noodles, while "like before, Orn continues to work
as an extra in Thai movies." It's a suggestion, perhaps, that life goes
on in its own strange and often disappointing way, that afternoons like
this, extended moments of contemplation and sensuality, are fleeting
and momentary, and also tinged with sadness. Implicit even in joy is the
inevitability of decay, of loss, of death, like the ants who skitter
gleefully across the food during the final scenes, ruining everything,
devouring whatever they find.