Roong longs for the day when she can be in the arms of her Burmese lover, Min, an illegal immigrant. She pays Orn, an older woman to take care of Min while she looks for a place for them to share their happiness. One afternoon, Min takes Roong to have a picnic in the jungle where they feel free to express their love. Meanwhile, Orn has also gone to the jungle with Tommy, her husband's co-worker.
EN
“I treasure some kinds of old Thai disaster movies. Many of such tell a forbidden love story between a man and a woman that the mother earth destroyed them. Similarly, Blissfully Yours contains innocent narrative and simple characters. The settings are open landscapes and the disaster plot is there, except that it is transformed into another kind of disaster.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul1
“The idea for Blissfully Yours was inspired by an incident that occurred in 1998 while I was shooting my previous film at a downtown zoo in Bangkok. A policeman handcuffed two teenage women and threw them into a police car. I eventually learned that they were illegal Burmese
immigrants. This was not an uncommon incident. It is an aspect of living in Thailand that many people face.
However, even with all the uncertainty and hardship they have to endure, their lives cannot be completely in the dark. There must be some light passing through, no matter how imperceptible to others. Did the Burmese women enjoy the zoo as much as the other people there, before they were captured that afternoon? This question was the inspiration for Blissfully Yours – the idea of moments of happiness existing in an oppressive environment, the idea of the coexistence of lightness and darkness, of pleasure and suffering.
So I have cast the sun as my main character in this film. It is the primary source of energy for life, and at the same time, of destruction. It affects all the individuals in the story (a man’s mysterious sunburn, the relentless heat), and can be viewed as an invisible oppressive force around this area on the Thai-Burmese border. The second character is the jungle, which confines the protagonists despite their desire to find freedom there. In this story, I have chosen not to dwell on the political issues of the Thai-Burmese border, but to focus on mundane and futile activities, which in themselves carry an underlying political message.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul2
“When it first appeared at Cannes, Blissfully Yours was treated as though it were sui generis or, for those unaware of Mysterious Object at Noon, ex nihilo or virgin birth, free of precursors. But in various interviews Joe has expressed his admiration for two directors, worlds apart in most ways, whose converged influence one can sense in Blissfully Yours’ late pastorale. First, Bruce Baillie, whose experimental films Joe fell in love with while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, and whose placement of body in landscape and sense of the transformative nature of sunlight – Joe says, ‘I have cast the sun as my main character in this film’ – can be easily inferred in the quietly ecstatic treatment of the jungle, sunshine flashing and filtering through trees, coursing through water, beating down on Min’s shedding flesh and Roong’s upturned face. (Only natural light was employed in the jungle sequences, which created considerable difficulty, especially when the rains came.) Second, Cherd Songsri, the veteran Thai director whose films Joe has often cited as a formative influence: ‘He was the first Thai filmmaker to have a film in Venice a long time ago. His films are romantic and always attached to scenery, landscape. They are very old-fashioned, but I love their sincerity. You cannot find that in modern Thai films.’ In the patient way Apichatpong waited for the right light, for the rainy season to pass – his crew consulted a spirit medium and a tree spirit for guidance, which led to a two-and-a-half-month hiatus in filming and return to Bangkok – and for the river to clear itself of mud and recede to lower levels, he reveals Buddhist endurance. He also joins such directors as Straub and Pialat who show the sun as it plays over face and body, leaving intact the douser-like effect of passing clouds. The gathering dark sky in the film’s second last image, before a brief, final one of Roong’s side-turned, weeping face, portends more trouble in paradise. Once provisional, bliss is now finished.”
James Quandt3
“As emblematised in the exilic figure of Min, Blissfully Yours is a film centrally concerned with border crossings of various kinds. Indeed, the film fosters and inhabits what might best be described as a register of generalised liminality: an in-between world of ambiguous figures and tangled intersections. It is a condition of multiform fusion that extends equally to its aesthetic. Much has been made of the alleged influence on Apichatpong’s filmmaking of the work of various Euro-American avant-gardists from the French surrealists and Jean-Luc Godard to Bruce Baillie and Andy Warhol. What is less frequently noted, because possibly less evident to many Western viewers, is his even more vital allegiance to nativist Thai cultural and cinematic traditions. By his own admission, Apichatpong’s cinematic education came largely through the steady diet of home-grown melodramas, comedies and horror films he consumed as a child in provincial Thailand and it informs his work in multiple ways. In the case of Blissfully Yours, the pervading strangeness and preternatural energy of the jungle spring straight from the pages of classic Thai ghost stories or pee neung baht, while the film’s central love triangle is clearly indebted to lakorn, the baroque soap operas of Thai TV. Add to this a strong dose of Buddhist cosmology in the form of thematic meditations on conditional impermanence or anicca, embedded allusions to animistic folk beliefs, and a generalised tenor of emotional mindfulness or jai yeng, and it makes Blissfully Yours a work with profound Thai roots and sensibilities. Even the celebrated anti-narrative dynamics of Apichatpong’s work owe as much to the loose and often incoherent structures of low budget popular Thai film of the 60s and 70s, as to the oppositional aesthetics of Euro-American avant-gardes.”
Brett Farmer4
- 1Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Director’s statement”.
- 2Apichatpong Weerasethakul, cited in an interview that was reprinted in Second Run’s 2006 DVD release of Blissfully Yours. Reprinted in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ed., James Quandt. (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2009), 219.
- 3James Quandt, “Mysterious Object at Noon,” in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ed., James Quandt. (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2009), 55-56.
- 4Brett Farmer, “Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Transnational Poet of the New Thai Cinema: Blissfully Yours/Sud Sanaeha,” Senses of Cinema, February 2006.