But I think itвЂ™s more a matter of rhythms of affect, than it is of making literal sense of the narrative. The ending is ambiguous: the soldier confronts the tiger/shaman, and the scene turns back into the ancient painting.Д¬an we take this second part of the film as an allegory of desire? of its delays, its intense demands, its engulfing depths? ThatвЂ™s the best idea I have for understanding how the second part might relate to the first. (Also, the soldier often pauses to peel off leeches from his legs and arms). The pace is slow thereвЂ™s a lot of waiting. The sound is ambient noises of the jungle. The screen is mostly dark we barely see shapes emerging out of the shadows, it feels like we are on the edge of hallucination. We have titles, superimposed on what looks like an ancient painting, telling us of a shaman who takes on the form of a tiger there are also ghosts and other apparitions, not to mention a talking monkey (who tells the soldier that he must either kill the shaman/tiger, or be devoured by him). A soldier (I couldnвЂ™t tell for sure if it was the same actor as in the first half), in the jungle and mostly at night, is tracking some sort of ghost or spirit. Now we have very self-consciously artful cinematography, with continuity rules mostly observed. The result is less to distance us from the characters and their feelings, than to emphasize, rather sweetly, how the feelings themselves are tentative and uncertain, as these lovers are still just starting to get to know one another.Д«ut around the middle of the film, everything suddenly changes. The camerawork here seems almost documentary-like (restlessly moving handheld camera, ambient sound that often drowns out the dialogue, naturalistic shots that often seem carelessly framed and composed), until you notice all the strange discordancies (jump cuts extreme jumps in time over a continuing soundtrack, so that it seems as if the same scene is continuing although the actors are wearing different clothes and it has changed from day to night, or it has clearly become the next day extreme long shots when a fairly intimate scene is in progress). The first half is a low-key love story between two young men, one a soldier and the other not. Apichatpong WeerasethakulвЂ™s Tropical Malady, one of the most talked-about films of the new Thai cinema, is a beautifully opaque film.

Joxi resto shaman