BLISSFULLY YOURS

Ok, I'm starting to really like this guy.

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's BLISSFULLY YOURS is the enigmatic and deceptively simple tale of three individuals who venture into the jungle in search of momentary respite from their lives in the city.

The film abruptly opens in a doctor's examination room, where a man named Min is being checked out for a painful rash that has spread over his body. Silent through out the examination, two women by his side instead do all the speaking. The younger one, Roong is his girlfriend, and the older woman is their friend Orn. What we don't know yet at this point is that Min is a Burmese migrant worker who is probably residing in Thailand illegally. The two women attempt to convince the doctor to issue Min a worker's permit to no avail. This scene sets the deadpan tone from jump- shot in a long, still wide, with a naturalistic uncomfortable air to the characters' interactions.

Weerasethakul's lingering pace is difficult to stomach through out the first "act" of the film, and maybe quite intentionally so. In the beginning, it seems we are being subjected to the rigor and dullness of everyday life. From the spirit destroying interiors of the doctor's office to the factory where Roong works, spending a little more time than we would care to in these soulless institutions raises the importance of the coming trip.

I referred to the portion of the film that takes place in the city as an "act", but I think its important to clarify that no semblance of a boring three-act structure exists here. Weerasethakul is obviously uninterested in conventional narrative and makes no attempt to unfold things in such a manner.

However, BLISSFULLY YOURS can be clearly divided into roughly two halves. This division comes when the opening title credits suddenly roll 45 minutes into the film, as Min and Roong cruise down country roads on the way to their forest destination. Its peculiar, but pretty much brilliant- acting as an intermission of sorts, transitioning us from oppressiveness to freedom.

And free we are at that point. As soon as we escape the city with the characters, the pace of the film is exactly the same, yet suddenly it feels liberating and mysterious. When Min, Roong and Orn finally arrive in the depths of the forest, they begin to shed layers both literally and figuratively. Slowly, each character begins to emerge from the smallest of exchanges. But Weerasethakul makes great strides to never provide you with a real handle on what stirs deep within them.

The scene with Roong and Orn in the river towards the end was just all kinds of amazing to me. The subtle shifts in tension, the mystery... it feels like there is so much going under the surface that you can't see... allusions that really feed your imagination.