Much ado about nothing

Two gay loves wander into a forest. One turns into a tiger, and runs off. The other spends the next hour or two looking for him. Hardly sounds like the most riveting of movie plots - but that's the synopsis of Tropical Malady, the film for which director Apichatpong Weerasethakul will walk down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival later this month as the first Thai to compete at the festival's top level.

It's not so much the substance of Apichatpong's films as their dreamy, almost hypnotic style that has captivated film buffs around the world. His last effort, Blissfully Yours, centred on two young lovers having a picnic in the woods. He won a top award in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes for the film in 2002.

This time, it's the big league. His film is up against works by the likes of the Coen brothers, Wong Kar-wai, Olivier Assayas and Michael Moore in the top tier of competition. Heavyweights, indeed, but Apichatpong, 33, seems to be taking it all in his stride. In an interview with a local newspaper last week, he said he was elated, but too busy to think about what it all means yet.

'We sent our almost-final cut to the festival, and they accepted it,' he said. 'Now we're rushing to finish the final cut and sound mixing. I'm in quite a panic.'

It's impossible to pigeonhole Apichatpong's work by genre - unless a new one is created for him. The weird bucolic postmodern Thai picture, perhaps. His oft-quoted mantra is: 'Nothing much happens in my films.'

'It's not a drama,' he says of Tropical Malady. 'But it's not a fantasy film, either. It has elements of the supernatural and it has special effects. But at the end, for me, it's a very simple film with a very simple story. It has no points, no formal structure. I prefer to let it meander. You could say its feeling is more or less the same as Blissfully Yours, although the editing will be slightly quicker this time. The thing is, I like the feeling of being in a forest. That's why I wrote the script in the first place.'

It might seem as if Apichatpong has burst into the limelight all of a sudden, but he's been quietly paying his dues and honing his craft. He grew up in the poor, northeastern province of Khon Kaen, with limited exposure to the arts, but with lots of time to potter about in the countryside and let his imagination run wild.