Two Letters (Mark Cousins/Tilda Swinton) Part II

Dear Mark,

I'm back from the big broad California. I'm
back in the little town in the Highlands of
Scotland.

The leaves have taken over the earth. This
morning, at 6, they were a pre-breakfast world
of Frosties underfoot. I'm slowly realising they
were doing exactly this all the time i was stepping
out in the sun last week in my flip flops.

I'm thinking that maybe it's particularly
the integrated schizophrenia of this intergalactic/
parochial existence of mine that makes
Apichatpong the man for me.

My children are at an age - just II - when
life's myriad choices can feel agonising to them.
Yes: i want to come for a walk on the beach
with you but yes, i also want to stay inside and
be warm. Yes, i want that cake with the interesting
icing on it but yes, i also want a bit of
good old millionaire shortbread. Yes, my best
friend makes me feel like crying sometimes: Yes,
i hate my beloved brother whom i cling to in
dark places.

Recently, it occurred to me to encourage
them to recognize that life can hold both, it can
be both and more: always. Brisk beach and
warm fire, all manner of delicious snysters, all
sides of a real person in a real relationship. It's
the question of choice that's all. Choice and
timing.

I was thinking particularly of Apitchatpong
Weerasethakul when i hit on this scheme: thinking
about his films and the spell they cast and
the other - meaner - spell they break. Of the
way in which he religiously - and i mean the
precision of that word - reminds us of the
balance, the coexistence, the all-round everythingness
of living, of human interaction,
of the natural world we are inescapably a part
of - and of its timing, its tick tock mechanism
of incessant movement, however imperceptible:
so much more vast than anything we tiny,
choiceladen wee human beans could ever hold.

When i saw Tropical Malady in Cannes - the
first of his films i had seen - i thought that the
reels had been switched accidentally. I actually
sat up and looked for an official in the aisle.
A modern, tentatively-poised relationship evolving.
Cut to a mysterious creature glimpsed hunted?
- through the trees of a forest, incessantly,
for the rest of the film. How could this be
so? I felt myself blush, caught out, indecent:
how could it be that falling in love itself could
be purposefully unspooling in its raw, natural
order in front of this civilised audience? For isn't
this what the first steps towards the fever
of love are exactly - the malady of the title – but
stepping into the haze of the intoxicating jungle?
Going barefoot and without a hat? Heart in
your throat and sweat prickling up everywhere?

Eventually the forest, this film murmurs.
Inevitably, inexorably, the forest.

When i discovered Blissfully Yours, i saw that
this question of sacredness is no random guess
on Apichatpong's part, or even mine. My memories
are clearer of this film, somehow, not only
because i saw it more recently: because i was
ready for the forest, gagging for it, in fact, but i
can offer only sense memories from the tip of
my taste buds:

The skin of a young Burmese man peels
away. He is illegally in Thailand and must pretend
to be mute and to have fictional family
relations with two women, one older and one
younger (we are mute, shaded, delicate, alien as
he is as we enter into this film). Once they leave
society behind, the details buzz:

His dearly loved wife and child, only referred to
in a letter home in voice over.

The reference to the girl's abusive boyfriend,
superimposed on the screen like a doodle, like a
tattoo.

The moment when the mother of the drowned
child submerges herself in the daytime river
fully clothed.

We know she wants another child.
We watch her fuck in the forest.
We look for the longing in her face, in her legs.

The ants invade the discarded picnic: nothing
but nature is certain.

Now she watches the young lovers.
She cries
in her brown midlife underpants.

She steals a smoke
the river gurgles by
the girl teases her lover's cock out of its fly and
caresses it awake.

Nothing but nature is certain.
Flies settle on the faces of people, bird calls mesmerize
the atmosphere.
All this and nothing more: no drama, no mise
en scene, no brouhaha.
Just human animals breathing in and out and
taking their place in the day.

Eventually, by the last few frames, we are in the
girl's ecstatic reverie.
We are in that head.

That is our arm, flung up across the bank.
That's tonight's - our - sunset drawing in.

That is me looking up and into the camera.

I wish we could show my children these films,
although i know we won't for some years. I feel
they would settle them, give them a divining
rod for the future, when the light might trick
them into thinking editing is the answer to a
sense of real power in life.

But i am patient. It's bigger children that
need these archeological remnants of sentient-cohesive
- possibilities, of post-choice harmony,
these reminders of the natural order of gesture,
of faith, of acceptance.

Alongside the medieval space programme
that is the cinema of Bela Tarr, i would suggest
that Apichatpong is one of the very few truly
modern filmmakers working today, far beyond
the pale of both narrative tradition and postmodern
experiment. The forest binds the soul
and holds it, safe and wild, in his cinema. I am
deeply besotted with that particular wilderness.

Coordinated swoon, my pal,
Tilda