Worldly Desires

Description: This digital featurette not quite a companion piece to Tropical Malady but certainly related to it shows Joe operating at the height of his formalist powers One of the things I ve valued about Weerasethakul s work since Mysterious Object at Noon is his commitment to exploring the traditions of avant garde cinema while taking those idioms into uncharted territory While some works by Joe have displayed an interest in bending the strategies of Andy Warhol and Bruce Baillie to the needs of Thai folklore and narrative gamesmanship Worldly Desires takes a more structural approach However this piece bears little resemblance to structural film as we usually think of it if there are specific touchstones for Worldly Desires in film history they would be those other structuralists so wonky and off the beaten track as to thwart easy categorization Like Morgan Fisher s early film projects Worldly Desires is a documentation of the filmmaking process Within a single expansive jungle location portions of a Thai soap opera are being filmed by day and a music video is being made by night We watch at a significant remove behind the camera and lighting crews Multiple views display random bits of business on the periphery like the craft services table or a playback monitor However the stringent day night rhythmic structure breaks down in the end the night song about a woman wondering if she ll be as lucky in love as her mom was an Electra Complex with a disco beat eventually bleeding into the daytime shoot But more significantly the relatively austere TV production whose melodramatic dialogue is mostly heard in disconnected snippets is contrapuntally offset by the swelling musical numbers They break up the video with the unexpected jolt of pure pleasure Although these sequences recall the musical interludes in certain of Tsai Ming liang s films they re shot in the mode of early Hou Hsiao hsien dancing girls reduced to tiny figures in a wide expanse itself engulfed within an intractable master shot The rigor comedy handoff recalls aspects of Owen Land s work but perhaps more importantly Joe s visual and conceptual approach displays a sensitivity to the unique qualities of the jungle landscape a willingness to let the location become the subject of the piece Worldly Desires is a landscape film one that brings that most mythologically burdened aspect of Tropical Malady its deep dark thicket of the soul and allows it to grow wild and overtake the image

Country:  Thailand

Released: 2005

Genre: Drama

Tags: Worldly Desires drama 2005 kdrama romance drama mystery drama online free