Criticisms like "this is a typical art film - pretentious, slow, unengaging, for no discernible reason but to torture the audience" ignore the wealth of thought loaded into each scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Blissfully Yours."
Synopses are a funny thing. I remember watching Godard's In Praise of Love last year, reading the synopsis of it afterward in the local paper, and thinking "Oh, is that what happened in the film?" The plot--the clear, articulable part of the film which, therefore, made it to print--was faintly recognizable. But the greater part of my experience of the film was everything else, the … less articulable. In the same way, to say Blissfully Yours (the second feature film from Thailand's leading independent filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) is about 'a bucolic idyll for two lovers' is to silence too much, if not outright mislead.
There are two 'lovers' in the film: Roong, a young Thai factory worker (who hand paints figurines of Bugs Bunny), and Min, an illegal Burmese immigrant. Roong pays off Orn, a middle-aged woman, to gather some documents for Min to legalize him for work, and then bring him to her factory so they can escape for the day. The film does not, however, attempt to seduce the viewer with its beautiful cinematography (it was shot in the jungles of Khao Yai national park), but manages in nearly every scene to obstruct the visual pleasure the images ought to contain, or could easily be used for. It's a paradise held at bay, and in another sense, a way to keep the tourism of the film at bay. Critics complain that 'even the sex scenes are boring,' yet I'd argue that that's exactly the point. If what you wanted to see was 'playful eroticism' in beautiful natural settings, why would you give one of the lovers a bad case of eczema? For every cliché of the afternoon tryst, there's some kind of irritation, a comic, diabolical force that won't allow its corresponding pleasure: the chocolate melts, the picnic is ruined by ants, sex between Min and Roong never happens (only one-directional oral sex and a handjob), and in an undesirable twist, an unwanted third person (Orn) interrupts everything.
Blissfully Yours is a film that contains within it the method for how to read it. One of the overarching strategies of the film is a kind of delay. We are given a scene to parse out, and some sort of information enters which reorganizes the values of the scene. One image seems paradigmatic of this approach: a shot of running water sparkling in the sun is punctuated by a bright leaf that enters the frame.
The stress is on the waiting, which takes different rhythms, and is often comic in upturning our expectations. For example, when Orn is having a post-coital moment with her lover--they both look at something offscreen which is then revealed to be a triumphantly upraised, used condom. Or, earlier, we see her lover pleasuring her, and only later do we see that he has been doing it, rather surprisingly, with a large fruit.
In a key scene, we see Orn chopping vegetables, and mixing in an array of lotions and creams (a combination good for visually inducing nausea). "What are you doing?" her husband asks, but he gets no answer, and neither do we, until later in the film when we see it used for Min's skin condition. The audience experiences what it is to look at an object and not know exactly what it is used for. We are possibly presented with a Third World point of view amidst pervasive signs of the transition from Third World to industrialized nation. Even when Min and Roong finally reach the point that he's promised her, a cliff with a wide view of the mountains of the Thai/Burmese border deep in the heart of the forest, we hear ever so faintly the constant unyielding sound of buzz saws cutting it down.
With great subtlety, Weerasethakul shows how Min arranges objects for a picnic. Min carefully readjusts a bottle of Pepsi, presumably so the label can be seen or read. It's a real "thing" in comparison to the food and meats. This reverence of things is played out in a catty argument Orn and Roong have in the river as they apply Orn's skin cream concoction onto Min's peeling skin. It turns out all the lotions and creams had been Roong's, and she is upset that Orn has mixed vegetables into it. Roong spitefully picks them out. The skin cream turns into a kind of metaphor for the state of a third world country in transition: Orn, the middle-aged Thai woman, sees no conflict between nature and products. Roong, of a younger generation, reveres products. The mixture of both, as we know when Orn's husband tastes it, results in a comic, hallucinogenic vision.
Weerasethakul's characterization of Roong is also admirable. This outing, which was to get away from the pressures of the factory, seems a natural outgrowth of the factory. Roong is enjoying the first sensations of her financial independence, which seems symbolized by the fake Louis Vuitton bag she carries. Even though she's a salaried employ of small means, she uses these small means to employ Orn and be Min's benefactor—small surprise that she isn't aware of any of the signs that Min is not in love with her, but only grateful and gently subservient. One of the last images, perhaps the longest in the film, is of Roong transfigured; for what seems like five minutes, we watch a close up of her in Min's arms, breathing as drops of sweat slowly drip down her face. This seems to be what the director calls a moment of "happiness within suffering." Perhaps Roong is meant to transcend her pettiness at this point, but the placement of the image failed, and the cliché image of looking up into the eternal sky and golden clouds which followed are admittedly very boring. Yet one can imagine that for a young girl like Roong, it may be possible to have escaped from the weight of daily life, to have touched a kind of paradise, and to have forgotten it was purchased.
While I wasn't won over completely by the film, which seems to pull at the confines of traditional narrative rather than break from them, it's necessary to recognize its considerable strengths in subtle character observation, political allegory, and a new kind of filmic logic. Common criticisms like 'this is a typical art film, pretentious, slow, unengaging, for no discernible reason but to torture the audience' ignore the wealth of thought loaded into each scene. I may have been bored at times, but as Warhol says, why is that a bad thing?