A couple explores the jungle in search of a spiritual tree while a film crew shoots a musical number.
EN
“A couple escaped their family to look for a spiritual tree in the jungle. There is a song at night, a song that spoke about an innocent idea of love and a quest for happiness.
Worldly Desires is an experimental project where I invited a filmmaker friend, Pimpaka Towira, to shoot the love story by day and the song by night. The story, Deep Red Bloody Night, was written by my assistant who wanted to reprise a forbidden love story in a more romantic time in the past. I picked a pop song, ‘Will I be Lucky?’ to convey a sense of guiltless freedom one feels when being hit by love. The video is a little simulation of manners, dedicated to the memories of filmmaking in the jungle during the year 2001-2005.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul1
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I like the piece of music that is used in the film, so I imagined a group of angels that appear every night to perform the song. It is nonsense actually. But it is a way to express what I like about filmmaking in a free style. Maybe it is like an immediate sketch of the trees, of the sun. In retrospect, the shooting period of four days was more important to me than the finished film. It was like we created a performance, and the video is simply a documentation of it, not a movie in itself. The performance pays respect to the different jungles where I have filmed over the past few years.
Interviewer: Tell me about the inspiration you get from the jungle?
At first, it was just an excuse to get out of Bangkok. But gradually as I stayed in the jungle longer, I became fascinated by its beauty and its sound. Each jungle has different characters and colours. So working becomes so pleasurable that I like to share this feeling with the viewers. I feel so insignificant – maybe like when you are in space. It always made me imagine when we all used to live in the jungle, in caves
Apichatpong Weerasethakul2
“Though the film’s originality is one of its strongest suits, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s delightful 42-minute vignette Worldly Desires can perhaps be best summed up as a cross between Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Victor Erice’s The Quince Tree Sun and Peter Braatz’s No Frank In Lumberton – the latter a little-seen but dazzlingly cubist look behind the scenes on the set of Blue Velvet. Worldly Desires is also a kind of ‘making of’, though the viewer here is unable to tell whether the ‘film within the film’ (a romantic fable with musical interludes, in which a star-crossed couple flee into the jungle) is real or fictional – and it soon becomes apparent that this question is at best irrelevant, at worst unhelpful. A document of shimmering, teasingly enigmatic fragments, the film functions as a playful dissection and deconstruction of cinema (if any dissection can indeed be playful, that is). Deadpan humour abounds – Weerasethakul manipulates and assembles his material with a beguilingly confident light touch, showing an instinctive flair for framing, editing and sound-design that leaves the viewer (somehow) both sated and happy for more.”
Neil Young3
- 1Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Director’s Statement”.
- 2Apichatpong Weerasethakul, cited in James Quandt, ed., Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2009), 230.
- 3Neil Young, “KINO OTOK III: Izola Film Festival, Slovenia,” Jigsaw Lounge, 29 May 2006.
